AstonishMe

Once Upon a Greenhouse Window

2010-05-03T18:32:00.001-07:00

I am so sorry I disappeared. I had computer problems that hopefully have been solved, finally, with some rewiring here and there. Then I was knocked for a loop, but in a good way. At least things will be good once the dust settles.

Away from this blog, I am a freelancer and have been tending to that part of my life. So I am posting a piece from a website I write for to explain myself a bit. Then I hope to be back very soon, once I stop shaking (!), for another "Paris" installment.

Thank you, Ellen, for your very sweet note asking after me!

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We moved into the house just weeks before I became a mother. It was my refuge. It sheltered us as we cried a river of tears, all of us adjusting to a new life, a new way of being. And those tears reshaped us, molded us into a family.

Later, the house spoke, telling me that the roses, the dogwoods and the holly that had been here when we moved in weren't enough, that I needed to garden in the small spaces outside for the first time in decades. So I went to nurseries and garden centers and talked to people about what to do and brought things home to plant.

Then I discovered the wonder of seeds. Or rediscovered them, they were my father's favorite way to garden, his passion, which had been waiting inside me too, all along. We all are gardeners, I think, it just takes time to find the things within us to bring into the open, to coax into bloom. When we are gardening from that inner space, we are so like our gardens.

Someone I grew up with told me recently that she has great success growing orchids. I didn't know that, but I wasn't surprised. She yearns to live in a tropical climate. That's like my obsession with Angel's Trumpets, another tropical native. I'm too far north, so I grow the angels, defying nature, surrounding myself with the accessories of the climate I yearn for.

I grow the angels in pots outside my Virginia home, the house where I felt my late father's presence, so palpable, on the night before my son was born. I woke up in labor, but it wasn't yet time to go to the hospital, so I told my husband to go back to sleep until dawn. My eyes were drawn over and over to a dark corner of the basement family room where I chose to wait. I could not see my father, but I sensed him there, in just that spot. At times I was sure I detected his scent. He kept my terror at bay.

And it may be for that reason I have resisted leaving here. We grew out of this house long ago. We never intended to stay for so long. My husband has wanted to move for years. Then, a couple of years ago, my son, now 16, started lobbying. Although I did not want to move, I agreed to look.

Then it happened. We found a storybook house in lovely condition, so a move is in the works, with all the madness that entails, especially for someone like me. I like to be, well, settled. But the new house has more room for my gardening. It has a lovely wooden deck and a covered back porch that needs only a ceiling fan and some wicker furniture to be perfect.

It also has something else. I'm always so sad in the winter, because of the northern Virginia cold, because I can't garden indoors with the bad light, the drying electric heat.

But when I walked into the storybook house, there it was, in the kitchen over the sink -- a greenhouse window, something I always have wanted.

The sun was shining through the glass. The second I saw that window, I knew. This house, too, was speaking to me.

The Present He Doesn't Even See

2010-03-05T10:18:00.001-08:00

My husband's mother died this week, at 91. This was unexpected. But still, circle of life. She had been declining, for several years. She had moved recently from a retirement cottage into a room in the assisted living facility next door. She had been, as she told my husband recently, "just existing."

We last saw her at Thanksgiving, when we went to Iowa to spend the holiday with her. Which is a good thing because another daughter had intended to come, but couldn't at the last minute because she got sick. But it was okay because we were there. And she did an interesting thing that wasn't like her.

So unlike her that we puzzled over it for a while. And the only thing I could come up with was this, I remember specifically thinking it, "She is saying her goodbyes."

My husband is the youngest of five, the caboose baby. Seven years younger than the sibling closest in age. All the siblings adored their mother. She was a nurse in a hospital for a short time, then resigned and threw herself into motherhood and civic duty, volunteering in smalltown Iowa.

But she also marched in pro-choice rallies, supported the local Planned Parenthood. She strongly believed in that. She was very outspoken.

I came to the family late. As did my son. Her other daughter-in-law called her "mom," but that did not feel right to me and when someone brought it up she agreed that was not appropriate for us. She did not mince words. At first I thought the issue was that she was very Midwestern and I was too Southern and we were not sympatico because of that. But I am crazy for Midwesterners. I finally came to terms with it, we were simply different. We did not "get" each other, but we were polite about it.

Her other grandchildren are a good deal older than my son. They spent lots of time with their grandmother. Some of them spent weeks at a time with her in Iowa. Some, even more time during various upheavals at home. Divorces and the like. My son never spent time with her alone. He saw her once a year, very briefly, with many other people around, most of the time.

But this is the thing. At Thanksgiving, my son's grandmother gave him her car. He was 15 then. My husband drove it back to Virginia. This was not like her. She was careful to not show favoritism. One grandchild asked for a couple of her many teacups a couple of years ago and she said no.

The car is a good one. A grandmother's car, certainly, a Chrysler. But with low mileage. My husband wondered aloud why she didn't sell it and divide the money between her five children. That was generally the kind of thing she would do. But she wanted my son to have it. She had decided.

But I knew why she didn't. She didn't elaborate, but it came to me eventually.

She was close to her other grandchildren, as I said. Several of them doted on her, visited her frequently, called, did things for her. She knew them and they knew her. She didn't really know my son, never had. But with each year, he looks and acts like her youngest child, my husband. Tall and lanky. And that child, my husband, looks just like his mother. So the three of them are a poster picture for the way strong genes are passed down through the generations despite being "diluted" by other parties.

Their blue eyes, for instance, glow from photos.

But that's not really why, their common looks.

I think she realized that she hadn't made that much of an impression on this last grandchild of hers. That he was unfailingly polite to her. She appreciated the chatty letters he wrote thanking her for the gifts. Telling her about his sports, his academic accomplishments. But she recognized a lack there.

What's the term? You reap what you sow. She may have noticed a lack of real warmth there.

So what did she do? She gave this boy a car. Think about it. It was brilliant. He was 15 then, poised on the edge of 16, getting ready to start driving, approaching the time when he would be able to get a license and walk out and climb into a vehicle that he could call his own. That he did not have to pay for, or wheedle or beg his parents for, sign over his first-born child.

Especially since we had always told him he would have to save up for a car. And he had been doing that. And his grandmother knew about that.

The woman was brilliant.

So now, this boy will grow older and smarter and more sentimental. And he will do it driving a burgundy Chrysler that once belonged to the Midwestern grandmother he didn't really know. And then he'll grow older and he'll remember his early years in his first car. And his Iowa grandmother, who thought enough of him to give him her car. To give him freedom.

Think about it. About what that really means in that context.

A boy and his car.

I'm laughing when I think about it: A boy and his car.

He doesn't even know it yet, but he is going to love this grandmother forever.

Waiting For Signs Too

2010-02-11T15:52:00.000-08:00

So Bethany talked about signs in a post. And I loved that. What she said as well as the subject. I look for them. Even though I think that's the best way, for me, not to see one.

Maybe I'm just dense. Or maybe I need something that is so unequivocal that I won't be able to talk myself out of it, something that makes me go weak in the knees with certainty.

Like things that happened after my father died. Which I kept dismissing. Hearing him laugh, even though he wasn't there. Hearing his truck pull into the driveway. Even though it had not moved from its spot.

He died suddenly, in an accident. And I blamed my mind. Playing tricks, I thought. My mind was unable to accept that he was gone because I did not see him in the hospital bed hooked up to monitors and breathing equipment like my mother and siblings. I did not see them remove those horrible things.

And those things happened as I hurtled through the air for home, my body curled into the side of the plane, face pressed against the window, crying in silence. People stared, repelled by grief, but I was unable to stop or care.

When I got home, and the first visitors left, I could hear him in another room, laughing. He had an infectious laugh. When you heard it, you had to laugh too, even when you had no idea why he was laughing. He would laugh and slap his thighs, then that laughter would take over his entire body. The way I laugh.

But during those days, I thought I had lost my mind. Because I heard him so clearly. And would rush from the room I was in, looking for him. And my mother would be there, just her, no one else, and would look up in surprise because I was almost running. Looking for something. I couldn't tell her what. How could I?

It was so exhausting I ended up leaving sooner than I really had to, flying back to Virginia, because I was desperate for rest. I had slept with the lights blazing because I was certain that if I turned them off and closed my eyes for a few seconds that he would be there. And even with the lights on and my eyes closed I could feel him there. So I squeezed my eyes shut and thought long and hard, "Go away. Please go away." Because I was so afraid.

But he was determined to get through.

So, a few months later, I had a dream. My father called from a payphone. He was dressed in his summer suit, seersucker, and was holding his best cream-colored hat. I said, "Where in the world have you been? We have been looking everywhere for you, so worried." And he told me not to worry, that he was fine. And he talked about his travels, which I don't really remember much about. But we had a nice long chat. And he hung up and I felt better. So much better.

But, still, he wasn't done.

A couple of years later, I woke up at midnight. I was in labor. This was my first and only child. I had waited quite late in the game to become a mother. I had not thought this would happen. The pregnancy had gone fine and I was taking off a couple of weeks before the due date to rest and get ready.

So I called the doctor and he said it was early in the labor, yet, to wait until daybreak to come. So I told my husband to sleep, that I wanted to go into the basement to watch television, read, maybe doze by myself. I insisted on this, I needed him to be rested and strong.

I went downstairs and settled on the sofa. And over the next hour I became overwhelmed with terror at what was about to happen. What have I done? I can't do this. I change my mind. I did not want my husband. I felt no one could help me. I think I prayed, I was so terrified that I don't remember.

And then I looked in the dark corner of the room. I couldn't see him, but he was there. My father. I thought I smelled his scent, aftershave, something. I felt him as strongly as I have ever felt anything in my life. I calmed down. I settled back into the pillows and pulled up the covers. And I kept my eyes on that spot.

I felt him, hovering nearby, for the next 19 hours. Through my healthy son's uneventful birth. And then my father was gone.

I missed him so during the next few years. I thought about how much he would have loved my son, who was like him in so many ways. My father was an accomplished baseball and tennis player. And my son, when he could barely walk, would pick up little rocks and hit them with straws he pulled off juice boxes. He wasn't talking much when suddenly he was singing "Take me out to the ballgame..." swinging an imaginary bat the entire time. Where did he learn that song? We never knew. And tennis is his sport to this day.

And one day, a friend amazed me when she pointed out the way my son was walking onto the soccer field. "I love watching him walk. Look at him, he walks like such an athlete, chest first." My father walked exactly that way. Chest first, cock of the walk. My friend had never laid eyes on him.

Of course I talked about my father to my son. And my husband talked about his father too. My son didn't meet either of his grandfathers. They both died before he was born.

But it was my father my son was talking about when he wrote this poem. His teacher told me that, when she handed it to me, with tears gathering in her eyes.

"I never met my grandfather.
I wish I had
Sometimes I feel he is watching me."

My son was six when he wrote that. Six years old. You can think maybe I'm crazy, that I was so grief struck that I was hearing things right after my father died. And that people have dreams about the dead all the time to try to comfort themselves. And that the hormones of labor do all sorts of things to the mind.

But I did not feed notions to my son. I never talked about any of that to him. I was always very careful about not putting my ideas in my son's head. Besides, he has always been like his father, he is very literal, he wants proof. He's not one for signs. Show him.

But my son knew, back then. The way I knew. That my strong, larger-than-life father had given up his earthly form, yes. But that he was still here, too, for a while, anyway. That his huge spirit had things to do before going on ahead, without us.

He cheered us, with his laughter, which is mine now too. He comforted, with his strength. And he watched over us even when I could not see or feel him. But my son felt him. Fresh from that place beyond the veil, he knew.

Just in case, I'd like to say this out loud, in case he's listening. In case he wants to talk, or laugh out loud, or make his spirit's presence known somehow again.

Thank you, Daddy, for everything. My eyes are wide open and they'll stay that way. And I'm not afraid. I promise, I won't ever be afraid to see again.

The Boat and the Weeping Willow

2010-02-02T11:54:00.000-08:00

The weeping willow is my favorite tree. I have good reason for that.

I put flame to candle just now. As I watched the wick burn, I saw it, four of us in a small boat gliding on a pond in late spring. The willow was just ahead, branches dripping into the water at one end.

We all needed refuge. T., J. and their little brother lived in a lovely new house that shuddered with the fighting and rage inside. And in my home, for years the alternating chill and warmth felt like menace because it was unpredictable.

The woods behind my house offered easy solace. But escape was not so simple at T.'s. We had to stay inside most of the time, for one reason or another. Still, the girls were allowed weekend guests sometimes.

T.'s beautiful mother was always glad to see us. Her father was courteous until my parents left, then his cold silences returned and he disappeared into his bedroom or den. He worked odd hours at the airport nearby, so when he left, we took off as fast as we could, out the side door, through the garage, out. Into freedom.

Somehow, I can smell water. So it didn't take long to sniff out the pond. They had no idea it was there. They had moved to a new house in a development built on cleared farmland and had not ventured far from home.

We found the pond one beautiful day in late spring.

I remember the light. It scattered diamonds on the water's surface as we jostled and pushed each other while running over the grassy hill that had concealed the pond from the road. It was even more beautiful than the two ponds in the woods behind my house. Because bushes, wildflowers and grasses surrounded nearly every inch of water. And a huge weeping willow dripped branches into the water on the far end.

I fell in love that day. With a setting. And it had only just begun.

I saw it first. Something was underneath the shadowy surface at the shallow end. A piece of wood, an old box, maybe. I felt it with my hands, then started pulling. I yelled for help. We pulled and pushed and I am sure began to scream when I realized what we had.

A boat! A boat!

It was small, a little rowboat that someone had used once to float on that pond. We dragged it to the banks. And to our astonishment, it seemed largely intact, with a hole at one end. Then we found an oar, I don't remember where. But it was intact too.

The next thing I remember is getting buckets. We must have gone back to the house, a sneak mission. Because we were bailing water out of the boat. And then I found a long branch suitable for steering. Then I launched, testing whether the craft was seaworthy.

It started sinking. But I was living an old dream long lodged in my young heart and I was not giving up. I had a boat!!!

So T., who was sweet and girly, my opposite and my best friend, was assigned to bail along with my little sister/loyal assistant. They were the easy ones. T.'s younger sister J. was wild and prone to sass just like me, so I'm sure she argued for the pole position. But I had found the boat, I reasoned, and therefore was in charge. I also was the oldest, by one month, and certainly the bossiest. So she rowed.

We were wet and muddy by then and should have been freezing cold. But we had fallen into the arms of a bliss that transcends physical discomfort, then shelters in the heart for a lifetime. So we held onto the boat sides and pushed into the water and jumped in -- launched!

I know we were loud and raucous as we figured out how to stay afloat on that pond. But we managed. Eventually, we were balancing the boat with our weight to keep the hole out of the water, or mostly, so the bailers could take a break.

At first, I took us around the shallow edges of the pond to make sure we could stay afloat. My sister and I swam like fish, thanks to Mother for introducing us early to the lively waters of rivers and creeks. Then finally to my father's method of taking us into the middle of Flint River and releasing us, standing just short of our flailing arms, forcing us to "stop fooling around and swim." And we did!

Once established, we found a rhythm. We moved around the edges, through the middle, around again and then through the willow branches. That was the part I liked best. I will never forget those moments.

We fell silent as we approached the weeping willow, moving from clear bright spring sunlight into a deep green curtain that I pushed aside first with the pole, then my hands and arms. Suddenly inside the veil, the air was cooler and so still and quiet that we did not speak. If someone whispered, another shushed. Something ancient and mysterious was at work within the shadows of that tree. We did not understand it, but we clearly fell under the spell.

It calmed us. We spent hours at that pond, quietly rowing, then sitting, drifting, letting the wind gently blow the small boat through the water. Four little girls, two rarely quiet, sat in silence, suspended in time and space until the twilight began to steal through the cracks in the trees bracing the sky.

But then T.'s mother found us. And we were banned from the pond.

We slipped back once or twice and the boat was gone. I'm sure T.'s father removed it. T.'s mother was upset with herself for letting us be gone for so long. She was terrified from then on, worried we would go back and drown in that pond. I protested that little sister/loyal assistant and I would never drown.

But her children never learned to swim like that. Or roam. Or discover what the world held for them. Held tightly, encapsulated in a prism of fury not of their own making, they each in their own way stand apart in some way even today.

Which is why, not that long ago, I made T. come with me one day when I was visiting home. Ignoring her questions, I walked her through my sister's field to the pond and made her climb into the little flat boat. And I pushed us into the water despite the mosquitoes and the little snakes she kept looking for warily. And I paddled us into the middle of the water.

And we laughed about the old pond and the sunken boat and the willow tree. At a distance, I could see my little sister/loyal assistant, now all grown up, watching me as she has done her entire life. And then T. and I sat in silence, letting the twilight flow over the huge oaks onto our skin and into our lungs like a sweet cool wind.

And just under the orange sun dipping low, I swore I could see it. The weeping willow tree. It's still there. It is always still there.

My Summer of Flying

2010-01-30T16:31:00.000-08:00

Snow again. It sends my mind skittering from here, like dozens of waterbugs on the glassy surface of the pond in the woods. But it doesn't take long to find refuge. Mother reminded me at Christmas.

"Remember the summer you spent flying off the M.'s wellhouse?"

Another of my schemes. I took something my brother said -- about physics, about flying, about lift -- and mixed in my own harebrained ideas. My special brand of mental alchemy.

"You cannot be serious," my brother, the future engineer, would say. "Mother, you have to make her stop," was another of his requests. Mother would check to make sure I wasn't about to seriously harm myself or others, then let it go.

So I gathered my materials, enthusiasm bordering on hysteria, which drew a small crowd of followers. These included the believers, the bored and the skeptics. The last generally consisted of the neighbor boys, who enjoyed watching me fall on my face. My experiments frequently failed. But they always entertained.

It was summer and Mrs. M. watched my sister and me while my parents worked in town. No one was hauled off to camp or activities. The high school boys started two-a-day football practice at some point. And they got themselves to and from the field pretty much on their own.

Which left the rest of us to entertain ourselves. All day long. All summer. Three long, beautiful months.

So the first morning of the flying I was ready. I had kites and makeshift harnesses made of belts and ropes. I had money for helium balloons to be filled at the store across the highway. We needed lots of helium balloons. I had my long black satin cape and a myriad of other capes. I had cardboard boxes and tools for the building of aircraft. The materials, loaded into a red wagon and a wheelbarrow, were hauled to the M's with the help of my loyal assistant, my little sister.

I had barely slept. We were going to fly.

The M. sisters were already waiting for us at the big picture window. J., the oldest, S., M. and P.

We got the helium balloons and went to work at the sloping wellhouse. It was the tallest one in the neighborhood, almost five feet at the highest point. We climbed up, dragging our equipment. We were beginning to draw a crowd.

I don't remember everything. I know I was hoping for a windy day for my first attempts. We wrapped ourselves in harnesses, hooked kites to them and helium balloons. I could feel the slight tug of the kite against my weight. I held out my arms. I ran as fast as I could and jumped off the wellhouse.

Of course, I did not fly. But this did not discourage me. Not in the least.

I kept it up. We all did. J., the oldest of the M. girls, helped in between loads of housework and cooking and otherwise helping her mother. She wasn't really ready to grow up.

We went to work on wings, using all kinds of materials. We built aircraft using cardboard boxes and pillows for seats and tried to fly off the shortest point of the the wellhouse. Ouch. Not for long.

We added fake wings to the harnesses, Icarus-like. We interviewed each other and the "witnesses" with the seriousness of rocket scientists. We wrote down responses. Did you feel that? Did you feel any lift at all? Did anyone SEE anything? Just a little bit, you had to feel SOMETHING!

We were sure if we tinkered here and there, added this and that, jumped higher, ran faster, we would find the magic formula that would lift us into the sky. Into the wind. Up, up and away.

And our notion was not so off the wall if you think about what was going on around us at that time. Not for children growing up in a magic time and place. Yes, we were going through nuclear alert drills at school due to the Cold War -- watch for a flash of white light and get under your desk. But we weren't told to actually slide under those desks, like some. Our drills were verbal. Sort of wink-wink drills.

Because we had faith that such a thing would never happen. We also had a secret weapon.

Just to the south of us, in federal installations where many of our relatives reported five days a week, the work was being done to send man to the moon. Not only that, we had Werner von Braun, who had been responsible for some of the most feared German weapons before he surrendered at the end of World War II and came to Alabama to help lead the U.S. space race.

From time to time, we felt the earth move under us. "It's the big rockets," we were told. "They're testing them." So, we knew we were safe. The earth was moving. We were going to the moon. I mean, why couldn't we fly off the wellhouse?

So we tried. Over the course of days and on and off over weeks that summer. We just kept trying.

We never did fly, of course. At least not in a physical sense. But our hearts soared, up and out, over grass dew-tinted an emerald green, into wide open blue skies.

The sun's fire loosened our fluid young muscles. Air cleaned by miles of old forest curled into our lungs, sending blood pounding in our veins. Wind blew through our long soft hair as we stretched our arms high and grasped with small hands for clouds as white as the cotton bursting from the fields around us.

Over and over we jumped, throwing ourselves into radiance -- the sweet arms of a midsummer day in the deepest part of the South. Days we thought would never end, could never end. Drunk with it.

Other children gathered near the wellhouse to watch our whimsical quest. Then later, grownups too. They stood, watching, but not really seeing. Because their eyes had gone soft, remembering what could be seen only in memory -- their own long-gone childhoods.

So now, that wellhouse exists only in memory, too. We're all scattered to the winds. And J. has gone on ahead, without us, off somewhere with Cyn.

I'm going to try to catch a sign of them this summer, when I visit Alabama. When the crickets and Katydids are in full throat and the night sky is blazing with stars. That's when those days feel so close I can stretch arms into the darkness and almost pull them back to me.

I'll find an old wellhouse or another icon to sit on. Maybe I'll wear my black cape, not the satin one, that's long gone. But of course I have a black cape. I've always had one. I might have an opportunity to fly. Or something. And I want to be ready.

So, in the summer I'll look into the sky and recite the old directions. Tell them we'll all be along soon. Because I know where my friends went. And I know how to get there, when the time is right. We talked about it. You just follow some simple directions.

It's easy.

Listen closely. Remember?

All you have to do is hold up your arms, you way we used to do, take off running and fly. Up and away, into the sky. From there, just take the "second star to the right, and straight on 'till morning."

Hold on tight.

Much love, Glimmer

Running In The Night

2010-01-10T16:42:00.000-08:00

I was a sleepwalker. It's a family affliction. At least one in every generation.

We are selective, though. We don't always walk in the night. We pick and choose. The truth is I always have believed the places where we don't rest through the night in one spot are haunted in some way.

I have settled down, at least. I can't remember the last time I woke up in the pitch, holding my breath, knowing that once again I was not where I was supposed to be. Holding perfectly still, listening for just one clue, hearing only the decimating clanging of my own heart. Straining to see the smallest shimmer of light. Shaking with cold even in the heat, holding tight against the panic. Where am I? Where is this wall my hands are tracing?

I think, I hope, those days are long over.

We have certain characteristics, the night restless. My sister, when she was taken for several years, mainly talked, frantic, upset about something drastic that had gone wrong or was about to go bad. Her husband would question her about her fears, which made her furious. In her sleep.

One night when he was in his early 20s, Uncle H. tried to climb from the second floor window onto the roof of the porch of the farmhouse, but his mother caught him. She screamed for my father and his brother to help her. They ran to the hallway and this tiny woman had her oldest by the ankle, holding on for his dear life.

I roamed. My father found me one night sitting on the carport, legs crossed, silent and still, looking out into the rural South night. I had unlocked the front door, opened the storm, and walked around the house, through the grass and onto the flat concrete. Where I perched. And waited. For what? He woke up and had a notion and went into the living room, finding the door open. He knew something was amiss. Generational memory.

From then on, relatives were on alert. My favorite aunt had her husband build what he laughingly called "an idiot gate" for the stairs leading to the basement. He insisted it was for my grandmother, not me. I don't remember ever sleep walking in that house, although he said he heard me one night, as a middle schooler, shouting from my bed and went to see about the commotion. I was sitting up, my hand raised in the air: "I voted for you Mr. Kennedy, I voted for you!" A reference to our doomed president, John F. Kennedy, who had been assassinated a couple of years earlier.

When I was grown, my brother told me he got up early and went into the garage one day. The dog slapped her tail on the concrete floor in greeting. Odd, he thought, Daisy stayed prone on the ground in a corner, lying next to a doll, instead of running over to say hello. He walked over to check on the dog. He was startled. The "doll" was his daughter, 3, holding tightly to Daisy. The little girl was fast asleep.

He picked her up and she started to cry. She said she woke up in the garage, and couldn't get back in, the door was locked. I asked my brother, "What in the world happened?" And he said, "You're asking me that? You know what happened." And, I said, "Oh yeah. I'm sorry."

She's a physician now, married to her longtime prince charming, a Navy helicopter pilot, who keeps her grounded at night. But, at least one in every generation.

I seemed to have been the longest walker, duration-wise. Then I married JO, a light sleeper. When I moved at night, his arm would clamp down like automatic prison bars. If I needed to go to the "ladies," for instance, I had to argue my way out of the vise, prove I was awake somehow. In the early years, he was the sleepwalking police.

After puberty, my son became the sleepwalker in the house. An athlete, one night he ran in his sleep, swiftly from his bedroom, down the stairs, to the back door and out. In my sleep I heard him, somehow, the mother in me overruling my sleeping self, moving silently from the bed, fast and light on my feet, down the stairs I followed, calling his name before I was fully awake.

"Stop. Stop! Right now, you need to stop this second and turn around and come back in the house."

Finally, he stopped. "What?" "Come in, you're asleep." I took his arm. His sleepwalking self is ephemeral and smaller, somehow, almost as though he could slip through my hands into the ether unless I hold on tightly. He's there and he's not. Like some of the molecules making up this boy now towering over me are somewhere else.

So he's easy to guide once I have my hand on his arm, once he hears my voice. He does not resist. "Okay," he says, moving back into the direction I lead him. Then awake, he's fully there, all molecules present, dense, like me.

He has settled down too, lately. But the sleepwalking reappears when we visit his Iowa grandmother. She lives in a tiny cottage on the grounds of a huge old assisted living facility, where we stay. This is a wonderful service provided for the families of the people who live in these units. Rooms for guests are provided free of charge.

But my son tries to leave the room in his sleep all night. So I can't allow him to stay in a room alone. One of us, my husband or I, have to sleep in one of the twin beds to keep him in the room, keep him from roaming the halls.

Because an hour or so after lights out, it starts. He argues, gets up and rushes for the door, fast. Other times he'll slip quietly from the bed and sneak, trying to get out before I can wake up. He's urgent, upset, and he argues. All in his sleep. He is desperate to get out of the room, out of the building. This has happened everytime we have stayed there since he went into puberty.

The last time we were there, I was fed up after multiple escape attempts. Finally I said to this sleeping boy, "Okay, what are you going to do if I let you leave this room and the building? In the middle of the night in the freezing cold in the middle of nowhere Iowa? How are you going to get out of here, out of Iowa, get back home?" Or words to this effect.

Quietly, calmly, in the dark winter night of the Midwest, he told me matter-of-factly, "Sarah will help me."

"Go to bed," I said. And he did. We don't know a Sarah, or we haven't since fifth grade, five years ago. This huge old, gothic nursing home/assisted living facility is full of ghosts. That's what I think.

Because at my mother's house, D. sleeps peacefully, all night long, not a peep from him. And always has. Mother built this house a year after my father died. No one else has lived there.

So many questions. No real answers. I used to bring up the sleepwalking to doctors. Who have no answers, no response, no solution. So I don't talk about it anymore. I have read and read. No real answers there either. Contradictory information. We generally grow out of it anyway. Eventually.

At least one in every generation. Calm and collected in the daytime, happy, well-adjusted. Yet desperate in the deep, dark night. Trying to escape a nightmare we don't remember, recognize or understand in the light of day. Which would be very upsetting except for the stories about the generations of us affected by this. We've heard them as long as any of us can remember.

At least one in every generation. Restless in the night. Running from something never seen and rarely remembered.

We Did It, Cyn

2010-01-08T09:51:00.000-08:00

We did it, Cyn. Girl we did it.

I felt you. I couldn't have watched a second of that game without you "there" somehow. Tide nerves. All my talk back when about not being interested in football, about the Crimson Tide. That was blither. You knew.

Cyn called that (Longhorn) bull from hundreds of miles away. That's the thing about keeping friends through the decades. They know your crap.

She always knew when I was thinking about going to the floorboards. You know, the way the Mafia went to the mattresses during times of conflict? When we were little, we slipped keys out of purses and crawled into the family cars, onto the floorboards, to listen to the game on the radio and pray for the Crimson Tide to pull out just one more victory, for us and for the Bear.

I was thinking about doing that on Thursday night, despite the freezing weather, about the time I called that baby Longhorn QB "a little A..-hole" in front of my teenage son. The same baby quarterback I'd worried about earlier when he went in to replace the regular quarterback. "Don't hurt him," I told the mountain-sized Alabama defensemen through the TV screen.

We needed that victory more than Texas. Texas has the Cowboys. Texas has the legends, the romance, the ranches. We used to visit family friends near Denton, Texas, with a ranch that could be viewed only by riding for a long time in a truck. They had peacocks. So I have two beautiful silk shawls with peacocks on them. I slide one over my bare arms and think of Texas. Of big skies, ranches, cowboys and those peacocks.

Paul "Bear" Bryant's Crimson Tide was just about the only positive news coming out of the state during the bad times, the 1960s, as Gov. George Wallace helmed the ugly fight against civil rights. The days of riots and fire hoses, bombings and white hoods. Unspeakable things, people hanging from tree limbs, ropes tied around their necks, horses charging praying men and women asking to be treated like human beings.

And then on Thursday night, our team brought it. Texas suffered a terrible injury early on and that wasn't fair. But still, those teams battled full out. Nobody phoned it in. Nobody sat on the ball to run out the clock in the last minutes, preserving a tie and stealing, in the eyes of the faithful, Alabama's deserved third national championship in a row. (If I must write it, this references the 1967 game against, shudder, Notre Dame).

Cyn wanted it so very badly, this win. So much so that our friend J., an Auburn graduate, sacrificed and pulled for Alabama for two years to make Cyn happy. And the Tide brought it to us, they brought it home. Even though I'm sure the cynical think she wasn't really "here" to see it.

But she's been around, somehow, still. Hovering near the veil, the membrane, whatever it is that separates us from the next place. I've been relaying her stories here, of course. And then last month, my husband found the ornament in the attic, tied with Crimson Tide ribbon. It showed up after being missing for years.

I posted the picture at the top. A few years after I married JO, she made that ornament and mailed it to him. She thought it was time to tell about the "secret clause" that had been inserted into the marriage vows. And which he had solemnly sworn to uphold, 'til death do us part and the like.

Although he was a proud son of the great state of Iowa, marriage to a woman with crimson red blood in her veins comes with a price. And that is sworn allegiance, for a lifetime, to the Tide. Above and beyond all others.

JO liked the idea, actually. An athletic man, he would rather do than watch. But he was happy for an excuse to "marry into a winning football team," as he put it. "Let's face it, the Hawkeyes suck." Well, not always. But he took to the team and converted our son last year, a rabid Washington Redskins fan who previously had no time for college ball. And now JO is working on his brother in Chicago and they're planning a pilgrimage next fall to see the Tide play in Alabama. Tailgating and all.

The ornament has a joke on it -- Cyn wrote "Louise" on the glass bulb, a nickname I gave her when we were little. I don't know why, we thought it was funny. She nicknamed my mother Mildred in response. Louise stuck. Even her mother called her Louise.

So, after Thursday's 37-21 whipping, I can hear "Louise" calling it that now, I think she can safely go on ahead. It's okay. Her work is done here.

She can move away, climb if she needs to, like we did with these mimosa trees in my yard so many times. We spent hours there, escaping from the hot summer sun, planning our futures, making fun of boys. We had no intention of marrying, ever. And then we both did. Twice.

I know a couple of guides who can accompany her if need be. She didn't like being alone, really. Her dad. And of course, mine. The strongest man I've ever known. He was particularly good at leading expeditions in trying circumstances.

I don't have proof. But I know her strong, vibrant, brave spirit is glowing just beyond the veil. And she'll be larking soon, where she's going. And what a treat "others" have in store.

I kept thinking of this after she passed, something I read, by Victor Hugo. It sums up what I think about the afterlife. Not think, feel. And somehow, I know it in my bones, in my blood.

"A ship sails and I stand watching till she fades on the horizon, and someone says, 'she is gone.'
Gone where?
Gone from my sight, that is all; she is just as large as when I saw her...
The diminished size and total loss of sight is in me, not in her, and just at the moment when someone says 'she is gone,' there are others who are watching her coming, and other voices take up a glad shout, 'there she comes!'...

And that is dying."

I can't see Cyn anymore, but I can hear her. Can you? Listen. It's Cyn, or maybe she's going by Louise these days. She's shouting. She's running, a feisty blue-eyed girl, blonde hair flying, growing smaller in my mind's eye, but she's shouting at the top of now-strong lungs, "37-21, 37-21, 37-21!!!!!!!!"

And they are shouting. Cheering. They've been waiting for the likes of her. And they're glad. They're shouting too, "There she comes!"

We love you, Cyn. J. and I and so many people, even those who got to know you by reading about you here. And we will never, ever forget you.

Godspeed.

A Bird Flew On My Head Too

2010-01-04T20:00:00.000-08:00

I've been blogging about a year now. And I could not have imagined then that I would have posted in this way, digging through old boxes, flipping through yellowed journal pages and photo albums. Reaching far back into time, retrieving lost places, words, lives.

I certainly never expected to lose Cyn, for instance. And the comments and emails that followed my posts about that infuse me with wonder, still. The solace, knowing and care helped me make sense of my childhood friend's death, something I had been simply unable to accept with any sort of equanimity.

Since I started writing here, I've changed in ways I'm just now starting to comprehend. And friends I had before I started this journey are people I know even better now. I told things about myself they had not known. And that, in turn, spurred them to revelation.

And now there are new friends, people I know through their blogs. And sometimes I'm surprised to remember we've not met in person. SB and Mel, Syd, now Danielle, who posts from so far away.

And Ms. Moon. One of those people I "knew" from the moment I read her first post. She's why I posted tonight in this vein. She has a post in her blog about a bird that landed on her head.
(http://www.blessourhearts.net/2010/01/she-was-trying-to-protect-her-head-by.html)And she said "... where IS the camera when you need it."

Which of course made me remember the picture I posted above and I told her about it. And said "come on over to my blog and I'll show you."

So, I was playing in my cousin's yard when a bird flew onto MY head. And just stayed. And stayed. And stayed. And my cousin ran into the house and found a camera. And ran back out and the bird was still there. So she snapped a picture. And the picture you see is a copy of the picture, who knows where the negative went.

I remember getting bored with the bird eventually and jumping around and causing it to fly away. My mother told me the bird landed there because I wouldn't allow her to properly brush my thick mop of curly hair "so it always looks like a bird's nest." She warned me that I would be subject to frequent bird head landings if I didn't brush my hair more.

But the most interesting thing about that picture, to me, is that my sister, who hated having her photo taken, stood there in peace. She generally would scream and yell and throw herself on the ground and kick and hold her breath and turn red. Sometimes she appeared in pictures that way, in a fury, but often she wasn't in them at all.

Once she said, when we were grown, that she didn't understand why there were so many pictures of our brother and me and so few of her. I looked at Mother for a significant few seconds. Then my mouth flew open. Then we burst out laughing. My sister really didn't remember her ways.

But she obviously was so taken with the wonder of the bird on my head that she stood for the picture and even smiled a little bit.

So, this kind of posting symbiosis happens all the time with Ms. Moon. She says something and I'll remember what happened to me that was just like that. And then somebody else will say something and I'll remember the thing in my life that was just like that too. And off we go.

My realization about that and the community we are forming around the words we write and read and comment on has been growing for a while. But it really didn't register fully until tonight.

Because I think we all are looking for similar things. The thing that makes us stop for a minute and be amazed. And remember the time when, yes, we too hosted birds on our heads, or something like them. Or at least when we got to be there for the wonder of it all.

As I said in the very beginning up top in the title of this blog and have said, not as a command but a gentle invitation since I was 18. Astonish me. And you all do, every single one of you.

Home

2009-12-30T08:40:00.000-08:00

I thrill to go back to the deep South still, 30 years after I moved hundreds of miles from home. There are so many reasons for this. Family of course. And the friends, some I've stayed close to since we were 5 years old.

But there is a visceral pull from the South that I do not experience anywhere else. It is a palpable, physical force. I feel it as I approach the airport, circling the vast farms that have survived development in the Tennessee River Valley. I love feeling the force from a train, but I get to do that only rarely.

So, my favorite way to re-enter the South is from a car. It gives me time to adjust. I'm never the one driving, of course. I love him for doing this, taking me there, 13 long, hard hours from Northern Virginia for Christmas.

We are old hands at it now, the three of us. This was no easy thing with a baby, a toddler, a whiny overly active boy under the age of 10. But now that D. is a teenager he sleeps a lot and just deals the rest of the way.

After a night in Chattanooga with old friends, C. and S., we get up and head out early. We laugh at the huge mega-stores selling fireworks at the Alabama-Tennessee border. And then they both just leave me be. We don't even discuss it, they both know.

Because with each mile inside Alabama, I become quieter. I relax, sink deeper into my seat. I stop hearing the radio. I don't hear my family talking to me or to each other. I am gone to them.

The hills are gentler over the border in Alabama. The old-growth trees stretch for miles. The grass glistens in the morning dew. And the water. Ponds, lakes, rivers stretching in every direction. North Alabama is covered in bodies of water.

The landscape draws in my eyes first, mile after mile. My body is so calm and so still that I lose the ability to speak. My eyes fill with tears. And then, unseen by others, my soul lifts from the seat. It slips from the car and drifts through the glass. I'm out.

I am floating, over glassy sheets of water that exist nowhere else on earth. Water that visits me in my dreams, lapping at the base of trees I knew so well in childhood. I am flying on the fingertips of clean, cold wind.

Alive again, kicking and running through the air, free. I am home. Thank you. I am home.

She Left Us Stories

2009-12-08T21:04:00.000-08:00

Cyn had reason to be skeptical of my schemes. When we were little, the small, blue-eyed blonde was the no-nonsense one, fierce. And I was full of fancy.

In fifth grade, R. tore up my class picture and handed it back to me, announcing he "liked" Cyn instead. He then asked for her photo. Forget it, she said, get lost. Plus, she told the stringbean boy, "I hate your fat guts and always will." Then, she jumped on the playground swing, leaving him standing literally in the dust, speechless.

So I remember preparing carefully when she came to my house not long after that. We had been spending most of our time together at Cyn's, where we were free to roam. But sometimes Mother insisted.

I decided we would go fishing in one of the ponds in the woods. I had seen Miss A., who babysat us and did a bit of ironing for Mother, carrying a huge terrapin down the old road along the woods line. She and her husband smiled and laughed as they told my father about their catch from the pond that day. They said they were making turtle soup that night.

Mother wouldn't let Daddy give me any gear. I was 10 or so and prone to drama, excessive grieving over dead bait in fishing pails. And during my one and only fishing trip, I screamed every time I caught a fish, which was frequently. I don't know why the fish were ignoring my uncle and father, who were in the same boat. They spent the day baiting my hooks and taking off the fish because I would go limp and refuse.

But seeing Miss A. and the terrapin had seized my imagination. Cyn had been peevish. So I asked for fish hooks and bait because Cyn had talked about fishing. Mother gave us things she and her brothers used when they were children. I was unsure, but she was adamant, so I packed everything up and inserted bullwhip and hunting knife into my elastic waistband, hand-me-downs from my brother. Then I tied a black satin cape around my neck. This last item was, well, fashion.

So, off we went, jumping over the grassy ditch spanned by my father's wooden footbridges, running past the huge oak with the rope swings and the barking bird dogs. We ran past their pens with bamboo poles flailing, a black-haired girl and a blonde, and one black cape floating in our loud, laughing wake.

I will never forget the path to that pond. Through the clearing with the old tree houses, we moved past the gnarled tree where we stole honeycomb when the bees were quiet. Then a quick bounding run through the strange bright light and eerie quiet in the middle of the woods. The spooky place that didn't make sense because the leaves were so thick overhead that I never understood where that light was coming from. But soon we were out of the ghostly light, climbing the old fence, careful of the rusting barbed wire with traces of old blood left by the careless, the unsuspecting, the clumsy.

Because at the top of the barbed wire, stretching high and balancing, we could see the water of that pond flashing in the sun, the touchstone of my childhood. Yes! Just there! And I would run for that pond, fast, feet nearly soundless on the dirt banks, taking me to the tree with the big long limb that soared over the water.

With Cyn that day, we set up our fishing gear. It looked strange. My mother had given us safety pins to tie on the end of string for the bamboo poles. And for the bait? Raw bacon. Mother insisted she and her brothers had actually caught fish using these. And I believed her.

Cyn didn't. She had three brothers and knew if there were fish in that pond they weren't going to be snagged by bacon and safety pins. But we climbed into that tree and threw the lines in anyway. I stretched out on my favorite limb, the black cape fluttering in the breeze.

Cyn was irritated, argumentative. She thought she was going to be bringing home fish. But she was stuck in the woods with an idiot who thought safety pins were fish hooks. She made fun of them. I defended. I made up stories about the buckets of fish my uncles had caught.

Then she started in on the pond. She didn't see any fish. "This is an old cow pond," I think she said. And then the cape. Why was I wearing that thing? What if people saw us? They would think we were stupid. They would think WE WERE JUST GIRLS!!! A frequent argument.

I dismissed her claims. Cyn and I were not easy-going children. But she got me, finally, on one point. I was lying on the tree limb with the black cape tied tightly around my neck. It was flowing down toward the ground. The sun was beating down. She kept talking to me, but I acted like I was about to fall asleep.

"You are going to fall off that tree limb and that cape is going to break your neck, Glimmer." I remember her words, clearly, to this day.

She was afraid. It took me years to comprehend that. But I remember taking the cape off and dropping from the limb. The girl who told off my young heart's first assassin was uncomfortable. So, forget the cape.

For the rest of the day, we played in and around the pond like the children we were, little wiggling snakes and all. Cyn's unease dissolved in the sun and the water.

Because she had been an ordinary girl, like me, just one year before. Then catastrophe struck. Her father took her brothers to a football game and never came home. His heart failed him.

Cyn understood, in a way I did not, that disaster unspools in the blink of an eye. That even a child must watch and be careful. Or those you love will vanish. So Cyn watched and controlled and fretted. Because she could not bear another hard loss.

But her good nature won out over the years. She turned the hard and the fanciful into stories. She worked with flowers and lightened her tales with laughter, drawing people to her along the way, so many people. Through her illness, we returned to the stories time and time again, the fishing, her "Tromper" in the woods, flaming boats sent down the creek into luminous southern nights.

And now she's gone on ahead. So I am the holder of the stories. I do not have her deep voice or the bright smile that framed the words lilting from her lips like a song. But I know them, nearly word for word. They glow like the candle I light when I put down the tales and pass them on.

She watched over us for nearly half a century. So the words are something. They are something.

Lightening Up, For Now

2009-12-06T18:44:00.000-08:00

No more somber posts for the rest of the month. That's how I am getting myself out of trouble. If anyone is strong enough to penetrate the veil from the other side, it would be Cyn. I can hear her. Sort of. She is saying, "Okay, you stop that right now. I mean it. Lighten up, dude."

So, I have a candle burning beside me. And I'm ready to chat.

I want to tell you that after I heard Cyn was terribly ill, I talked to an old friend, LC, a doctor of naturopathic medicine. We had just gotten back in touch after years of not hearing from each other. Naturopaths treat by utilizing the body's inherent ability to heal. They go to medical schools just like doctors, but study ways to tap the body's immunity using alternative methods instead of drugs.

LC immediately offered to present Cyn's situation to his naturopathic medical school, have the institution take her on as a case. Cyn was polite. But she declined. I had left her information, printouts, etc., on alternative healing. But she was hard-headed.

Or maybe she just remembered some of the things she heard me say about the people I ran around with after I moved to D.C. from Alabama, back in the day. When I worked for a company that pretended to hire actual grownups to work there.

I met LC back then, when he was just a boy, really. He was in college, a friend of a man I worked with I'll call V. V. wore black suits and had a stern expression that made him seem as though he was glaring at everyone all the time. He worked with the company's Latin American desk, it was called. After I got to know him, he said he didn't like to take vacations because "we are Latins, you know, if we leave the country, we will be overthrown."

And he wasn't stern at all. He was the least stern man I've ever known. Someone introduced me to V. one day and told me he covered the Lima, Peru nightclub scene when he was so young he wasn't even supposed to be in the clubs. He simply bluffed his way into them.

He continued that style when he went to college, in Boston. One holiday season, he was trying to rent a car with a couple of other Peruvian students and didn't possess something they needed (a credit card, I think). So V. decided to tell the rental agency clerks that the female student with them was "Miss Peru. And we urgently need to drive her to California for the Miss Universe pageant."

V. and his cohorts stomped around the office, going outside to pretend to use the pay phone, conferring in Spanish and calling each other fake names like "Che" in fake deep voices. They thought somehow this would help their case. The bluff didn't work. They never made it to California.

The kidding continued past college. After I had known him for a while, I heard V. was telling people I was a "black widow." That I claimed to be married, but no one had actually met my husband. I ignored this. I hadn't been an editor on the foreign desk long and still was laboring under the misinformation that I was to help save the world.

Then one day I accepted an invite to have coffee with E., who had just transferred to the foreign desk. He was a Tennessee gentleman who had an impressive background as a foreign correspondent. We went down to the deli in the first floor of the building, run by some very intense men, one of whom had barked forcefully at me when I asked him where he was from: "Palestine!"

E. sat with his back to the Deli counter, across from me. We sipped coffee and chatted. E. was telling me about his time in South America when I looked up and saw Mr. "Palestine" holding up a knife with a huge, scary blade, glittering in the sun through the plate glass window.

He pointed to the murderous looking weapon, then mouthed, "You want?" I frowned. What in the world? He gestured to the knife again. This time, he pointed the tip of the blade in the direction of E.'s back. Then he used his free hand to make a quick slashing motion across his neck. "You want to borrow?" he mouthed again, with emphasis. Oh. My. God. I remembered V.'s craziness about the black widow thing. He was obviously bored and had been down there acting up.

And then, E., the lovely man I had just met, saw that I was no longer paying attention to him. So he started turning around to see why. And "Palestine" pretended to be filing his nails with the saber. I had to tell him what V. was up to, and E. laughed like the good sport he was and is, but I swear he was nervous around me for a good long while.

And "Palestine" continued to offer me murder weapon loaners whenever I went in, which ended up being not such a bad thing. Because I always was waited on tout de suite, and given extra items, no charge, after being identified as a possible serial husband killer. I mean, respect in the big city is hard to come by. I had to take mine where I could get it. I was, after all, very busy pretending to believe I was saving the world.

It was V. who introduced me to LC and his brother, French-Nicaraguan college students in D.C. They had worked with their mother, a network television news fixer in Managua and that's how V knew them. LC was funny and sweet and fell in with our group of friends immediately.

LC and I were such good friends that he was one of the first people I told when I split up with the husband no one ever much saw. Yes, readers, I allowed him to live. But LC graduated and went to medical school in the upper northwest. I remarried and had a child and we simply lost touch. When I heard about Cyn I had just found LC on Facebook. When I told him about her plight in passing, he immediately wanted to help.

We talked on the phone. It was wonderful to hear his voice. It was as though only a few weeks had gone by instead of years. We laughed and caught up and conspired to "fix" Cyn. It would be hard. She would need to change everything. Lifestyle, diet, emotional, spiritual, everything would need to be tapped.

But she couldn't be persuaded to try that route. She didn't say why and I knew I couldn't make her. Especially a Cyn, whose will was mammoth.

I don't understand why she had to leave. But I am learning to look at what she brought to us. As Spellbound said in a comment, "I have to believe she accomplished what she came here for."

So I am looking at what she did manage, at least in my life, the micro view I guess. She brought LC back into my life, for one. And I am hearing from people from my hometown I've been out of touch with for decades. I mean, my classmates have always been quick to plan a reunion. If no one was interested in a big one, we had a small gathering, at a restaurant or a home. Cyn was a big part of that, she loved a get-together, wouldn't miss one. But I am amazed at the people I am hearing from now.

Because each day brings another person, someone I knew as a little girl or met as I edged toward womanhood. All of them I thought had been lost to time.

So one by one we open the circle, extending a hand and bringing in another person here, another one there. Then we grasp hands again, making a larger circle, holding on tight and closing in and moving toward and around a tiny figure in the middle, someone we can no longer see but know is there. Because she is drawing us in, her pull unfathomable but, now, seemingly without limit.

A Big, Great Heart, Gone

2009-12-02T18:03:00.000-08:00

Cyn, my wild tomboy friend, died at 8 a.m. Wednesday.

Her body gave out. The body that made so many childhood journeys with mine. The ones I was fortunate to have and knew it even then.

Slipping from our houses into the glowing summer nights of the deep south. Sinking, knees first, into grass and mud to launch burning shoebox boats from the creek bank, watching them float in flames into tree-lined blackness, with only stars to light the way. All for the simple joy of it (August entry, Wild Gratitude).

Later, we were spirited young teenagers who had the idea that we were the physical equals of our athletic older brothers. So we played pickup football and baseball with them. Then we fished and played tennis nearly everyday in the summer. In our minds, we were excellent natural athletes in no need of lessons. Or tennis shoes even. An old Polaroid shows Cyn in loafers on the tennis court. All we needed, we felt, were old rackets. And cute outfits.

We knew we would live forever.

Which is why I did not write in August about Cyn being sick. My husband says we knew this was coming. But I didn't, really I didn't, despite everything.

At Christmas two years ago, Cyn came to my son's birthday dinner in Alabama. We were hosting it there during a holiday visit. Already thin, Cyn was losing weight and doctors couldn't say why. "Stress," they suggested. A few months later we caught up at my niece's Alabama wedding, where Cyn, a self-employed florist, had done the flowers. No expense was spared on this wedding. My sister-in-law wanted Cyn and nobody else would do. As usual, the arrangements were the most striking thing in the rooms. Cyn, who taught herself to play the piano by ear as a child, was, simply put, an artist.

At the reception, we sat outside on a wall ledge and Cyn talked. She was still losing weight and exhausted, drawn. Doctors still said they couldn't find anything wrong. "I just feel there is something wrong. I know it somehow." But then she put on her usual cheerful facade. She would not fret for very long in front of others.

A short time later, she had a medical crisis. She was diagnosed in the E.R. as having this, then that. After a series of unnecessary treatments they removed her gallbladder. Then they decided none of that was the matter. That she had a faulty heart valve and COPD -- inherited. The same thing that killed her father before he was 40 and her older brother, my brother's friend. They sent her home with portable oxygen tanks.

Even more horrifying was the fact she did not have health insurance. Pre-existing health issues, a husband who left her, etc. The lung doctor kept telling her she was the heart doctor's problem and the heart doctor repeatedly shuffled her off to the lung man, saying surgery was impossible with her lungs in such poor shape. Cyn wasn't supposed to live this long. But the last time I saw her she looked so good I was amazed. She sounded good. She stuck around, defying the odds. She even went several times to Tunica, Miss., to gamble with friends and family. I thought she was going to make it.

But the past few weeks, she went downhill. Something happened during the weekend. Another crisis, then a seizure. And her body gave out.

She was a fighter. Although she would give away her last quarter if someone asked.
And although her life seemed straight out of Jerry Springer at times, with two marriages and some nightmarish betrayals, she stayed one of the most optimistic people I've ever known. That's what people loved most about her.

Which is why I cried on and off most of the day. And why my oldest friend J., who unfortunately got the call at school where she teaches, broke down too. J. is an Auburn graduate who has pulled for Alabama for two years because the Crimson Tide's bid for a national championship was giving Cyn such joy during her bad times. If you know anything at all about Auburn-Alabama football rivalry, you will understand this sacrifice J. made out of love.

Because Cyn turned her sadness into laughter, even after being told repeatedly by doctors that they couldn't help her. "You won't believe what happened next..." and then she would laugh a deep-throated laugh and start the tale. What others cried about, Cyn turned into material to laugh at.

She was one of a kind.

So I'm distraught. And I'm angry. I'm wondering what could have been done to change this outcome even though that is futile now. I can't focus on that right now.

I'm thinking instead about something an Irish musician/artist/poet told me a few months ago, Lucy, www.myspace.com/the2train. Lucy has a knack for words that take the heart and flood them with light. So it wasn't a surprise when she suggested a radio program that talked about an experiment by a Massachusetts area doctor who sought to measure the mass purportedly lost by a human body when the soul departed the body upon death (Radiolab, Sept. 18, 2009).

In 1907, Dr. Duncan MacDougall weighed six patients while they were in the process of dying. The entire bed was placed on an industrial-sized scale. And when the patients died, MacDougall found that the bodies lost on average of 21 grams within a short time. He suggested this was the weight of the soul.

So I am sitting here, not 24 hours after Cyn's soul left her body, and I'm looking out the window at the cold, dark, rainy night. And I keep wondering, "Where is she?" Because a soul that big, that generous, someone that expansive and full of life cannot just be gone.

I really do want to know. Cyn and I were friends for half a century -- little girls who were already friends when her father died much too early, partners in a foursome of girls who sang in talent shows. We refused to enroll in home economics in high school, taking science instead with a classroom of boys. After I graduated from college and took a newspaper job in a new town, Cyn showed up at my empty apartment on move-in day with my mother, having filled the truck bed with second-hand furnishings and the like from her home and shop. She knew I wouldn't bother.

And now I can't accept that she's gone. I need more time. There are journeys ahead and where is she? We thought we'd live forever. I need a little more time. With my bare feet in the mud of that creek bank beside Cyn's house. Little wild girls streaked with mud, twirling and dancing by the water under the moon, cheering the fire we had set in makeshift boats and in our hearts.

I want her back. I need a little more time. Please. I need her back.

What I See in His Blue Eyes

2009-11-28T16:21:00.000-08:00

No lectures, please, about going overboard during the holidays. I won't listen. I'm not going on a spending binge. But there are times to live large. And this is one of them.

Growing up, the moods brightened at my house perceptibly around Thanksgiving. My father, initials JC, took off work at least a month at the end of the year to spend time with family and to go quail hunting. Except for Sundays, he would be gone by the time we got up.

I remember hovering near the back door, watching for a glimpse of his green-clad figure as the shadows grew from gray to black in the woods behind the house. Then profound relief, as warm as the sun, would claim me when I heard his pointers rustling and barking. JC had whistled and waved them home. And in a few minutes he was there too, game bags full of Christmas quail.

JC was happiest out in the wilds. He was born on a large farm in a remote section of Tennessee, part of a big extended family living along a river bend that still bears our last name.

The parents lived in the "big house," the grown children and their families in smaller homes scattered nearby. They were prosperous farmers who celebrated holidays together, gathered for a main meal around a large table. On these days, the matriarch, Miss Becky they called her, brought out a bottle of whiskey and poured shots for her sons to enjoy, a reward for their hard work. This horrified my grandmother, a hard-line Methodist not used to these ways.

Then, tragedy struck. A horse threw my grandfather, a handsome man with thick, coal black hair and big, luminous blue eyes. He started being plagued by seizures. One day, at home alone with his little blue-eyed middle child, my father, he began to seize. It was over quickly. My grandfather, W., was dead. He left three little boys and a wife, who quickly packed up and whisked her boys away from the river to live with her own family.

These were kind people, stalwarts, profoundly religious. They were also poor and fiercely proud. The large, festive holiday celebrations were over. Holidays, in fact, were very simple. The boys were loved and taken care of, JC had nothing but good things to say about this side of his family. But I know now his days faded from bright to gray after his father died.

Yet, life goes on. He grew up and went to war in Europe, where he survived terrible things. He married and became a father. His wife was a teetotaller, too, so the holiday toasts he had revived for a short time as a grownup ended again. But still, with JC, holidays were times of celebrations.

On the Saturday before Easter, for example, he would disappear for hours. Then he would return, proud of himself, producing a box from the car with a flourish. Inside were exquisite corsages. I remember perfectly formed, quivering orchids for Mother. For my sister and me, tiny red roses clustered in dainty, artistic nests of greenery, secured by long pearled hat pins.

We tried to imagine the florist who made such inspired treasures in the middle of the Alabama sticks where we lived. These were not ordinary corsages. JC was mysterious. "Oh, a friend of mine makes these," he would say, mentioning a community by the river near my hometown. Mother's Day yielded similar surprises.

JC cared little for furnishings, accessories, trappings, embellishments. He wanted to be gardening if he couldn't be out hunting, trudging through woods and fields with those sleek bird dogs he raised and trained with chickens bartered from farmers with promises of quail.

But as Christmas approached, he rummaged through boxes in storage and pulled out lights, stringing them over bushes in front of our house back when they were costly and easily broken, before decorating in this way was popular.

Then, on Christmas Eve, he would vanish again. Through dinner and the opening of presents, JC was the happiest person at the table, especially when the grandchildren started arriving. Then, with the evening over, JC would finish the boiled custard he asked Mother to make every year, his mother's recipe. And this normally tight-fisted man would fish out a bank envelope and distribute $100 bills. To everyone, little children included. Even Mother got one.

One Christmas Eve something even more amazing happened. I was quite small. I heard sleigh bells ringing outside my bedroom window. I got up and looked, but couldn't see anything. I wasn't asleep, I had just gone to bed. No one heard the bells but me, or claimed them, which was unusual. Mother didn't believe in "telling lies" to children, Santa and the tooth fairy included. So anything along the lines had to originate with JC.

I can see him now. Hidden behind the bushes, dressed in hunting camouflage after a long day in the wilds with the dogs, crouched low, knees brushing the browning grass, shaking a rack of sleigh bells borrowed from a farmer over by the river.

Ringing sleigh bells, steaming dishes of Christmas quail, colored lights gleaming on a dark night. Trembling orchids and roses that left us speechless. Golden custard from an old recipe and $100 bills, all of it, held in hands that bequeathed not just material goods but layers of wonder, mystery, peals of laughter.

Because in the giving JC opened an airway for life's breath, which flowed into cold, dark shadows that had been still and silent around a large table for nearly half a century.

So don't pity me the tangled lights, the cinnamon roll baking, the wrapping and mailings, the long drive I insist we make through Virginia and Tennessee into Alabama, which is still home to me after 30 years of living elsewhere. The endless details that exhaust me to the point that sometimes I have to take a nap halfway through the Christmas Eve celebration.

And when I rouse myself long enough to hand over a $100 bill to my son, after all the gifts have been opened and put away, I see more than just his luminous blue eyes.

Because the holidays give us permission to celebrate life with all the surprise and wonder it deserves. We should throw everything we have at it, energy-wise anyway. Because I am not just doing this for myself, for presents, or for my immediate family. I am recovering what was lost, long ago. Filling those blue eyes with light again. I am living for the many, around that big table, JC right in the middle of them.

This one's for you, especially, all month long. Merry Christmas, Daddy.

Just Living

2009-11-12T12:26:00.000-08:00

(For S.B. -- "cat hoarder")

Some of the posts about my childhood have been called gothic. B. at www.playalittleguitar.com is mainly the one who says that. But the tall Texan loves a scary story no matter how much he pretends otherwise.

However, nothing in this blog is as gothic as the first weeks of life endured by an odd, fascinating creature I still know in Alabama. And I often think about the lesson he brought to me.

I'm not an animal person, really. I admire them from afar. Too many early heartaches with the cats in my life and then with dogs a mixed bag of that and the toddler experience of being dragged by a collie who did not understand that its leash had gotten caught around my neck and that is why people were chasing and screaming at him. Then there was the cocker that bit me in the face when I bent down to say hello.

But this story is about Buddy the cat.

We had made the long drive from northern Virginia to Alabama for Christmas. The stress of urban life falls from me in distinct layers with every 25 miles or so covered. Once we cross the border of Tennessee into Alabama, I am always struck by the utter darkness, penetrated only by distant Christmas lights, that time of year.

And then finally I'm home.

Within minutes my sister generally comes through my mother's back door. And that year she held something in her arms. It was Buddy. My son went straight for him. Then my husband started arguing for a "turn" holding the cat. They bickered. I was in my cat ignoring mode as usual, trying to best him at his game.

This was Buddy's story.

Buddy and several siblings had been owned by a woman who had a dog, a Jack Russell terrier. Maybe several dogs. But pretty quickly the Jack Russell killed a couple of her cat's new kittens. The owner had the animals separated, the cats in the fenced back yard and the dogs inside the house. But the Jack Russell was determined. He was, after all, a terrier. He kept getting out. Eventually, he had killed the mother and most of the kittens.

My niece, who was doing her medical residency at a hospital, had heard about the first killings. She was the dog owner's neighbor. She was working long hours and had a dog of her own. When she found out the back yard next door had continued to be a killing field, she had had all she could take.

She asked for the remaining kittens. She had no idea how she was going to save them, she couldn't keep them, her resident manager had made an exception for her dog and anyway he was not the kind of animal to accept tiny kittens either.

She arranged time off, swapped, cajoled, begged. She got the two kittens, put them in her car and headed for north Alabama after a long shift caring for humans. She had precious little time. She called her family, asking for mercy for these kittens. She would not take no for an answer. Two of her aunts couldn't say no either, after hearing the story.

My sister took a look at them. The little gray and white one crouched down low, staring at her. His eyes appeared to be crossed. Was he traumatized by all he had been through? Would he be difficult and hard to handle? She moved a bit closer. He jumped at her, held up a tiny paw and swatted her gently, eager to play. She picked him up and he cuddled, purred loudly and fell asleep in her arms.

This was the one. Perfect.

He behaved the same way with everyone he met. He mesmerized and charmed. He was the most curious cat I've ever seen, even for a cat. My sister's other cat would snarl and beat him up and Buddy would enjoy it, come back for more. It was as though he was happy for the attention, any attention, as long as he made it through alive.

My husband fell hard for him too:

My mother even fell for him. My mother doesn't even like animals. She would go to my sister's house "to see what Buddy is doing."

I did my best to ignore him. Someone recorded how well I succeeded.

He's all grown up now. But he acts like a wild thing, not really a domestic. He's huge. He lurks and sneaks around the house and ambushes anything that moves. But then you grab him and the purring starts and he's asleep on a lap, out cold, soft and warm.

He's one of a kind. He just got on with it. He lives life fully, hard, to the max, without as much as a glance back at those horrible times. I think about that. I remember that. He is telling us all something.

And yes, those eyes look to definitely be crossed.

There Is Still More To Say

2009-10-24T16:47:00.000-07:00

Late at night, absorbed in writing, something wrenches me into a sharp alert. I smell smoke. I'm certain of it. But no one smokes in this house. Still, I look around, peer from the window, get up and sniff the hallways.

The smoke is only in my mind. It is attached to a decades-old memory so resolute that I not only smell smoke, but seem to catch in the corner of my eye an ephemeral outline of a tiny woman balancing a long black cigarette holder, tendrils of smoke curling into the air. Professor H. Relaxed, sweater thrown over her shoulders. With a diamond ring glittering on her smallest finger, she holds forth in the large, high-ceiling old room.

"God that's it," she would say, in a deep, distinctive, gravelled voice that gave the impression of stage more than manuscript. "You've got something there. Go deeper. Write that."

Professor H. taught expository writing. I needed a senior year elective and V. recommended her. She told us to write our non-fiction essays on subjects that moved us. Go for the simple, she said. Forget lofty, that's artificial. Comb your memories. "Give me you."

I had scribbled diaries forever, journals, I had boxes of them. I brought a few back to school from home. They were from the early years. Growing up "like a wolf in the woods." Stealing honey from the gnarled tree with bamboo sticks. Hiding in a tree under the cover of black night. All the early hurts. Watching. Listening. Taking all those notes. I was bursting with essays.

But I also loved to listen to her. She had been friends for years with Scottie Fitzgerald, the daughter of F. Scott and Zelda. She had been in the Navy and traveled the world. She loved to talk, but more than that was an excellent listener.

The Alabama she knew through Scottie's tales, channeled through the southern aristocracy of Zelda's Montgomery, was a different universe from the northern part of the state. I grew up in the Tennessee River valley, surrounded by the Appalachian foothills. Our speech patterns, mannerisms, cultures, mores, all of it, worlds apart.

And Professor H. loved that. She wanted to hear more. Always.

And I had plenty of material to work from. Faded pictures, yellowed journals, scrapbooks. Mementoes from my time working in the mental institution as a volunteer. The wooden planks patient J. drew and colored on:

So many things. Boxes my husband in years since has tried to get me to throw away. "Let's clear away the clutter," he implores. What? The clutter?

This is my life. I've winnowed and thrown away and ditched so much. I have a few small boxes, still. Precious things. I can't lose them, not yet. They still need to be remembered, written about, witnessed. These pieces of paper and wood and written word are the reasons I can conjure up the detail that brings the visions to life here. Why I still remember.

Pictures, for instance. Uncle H's farm. Where the fox hunts started out. They're gone, H., my father, and recently their younger brother died in his 90s. The dogs they raised are long gone. But here, on these pages, they are waiting for their chance to bolt into that sweet fine night, blood and hearts pumping, strong, young, free.

Because when I write their stories, those who have vanished into the ether coalesce into vibrant life one more time. For mere moments, yes. Only for moments. But in that time, their memories take on the glow of flesh and blood and life. Like the black-haired boy R.G., who a couple of years ago drove to the river where we all used to go growing up. He got out, moved around, got back into the car. He did this for several hours. And then he took a gun and killed himself. What happened? Why? I ask and no one can tell me. Because they just don't know.

So I put away the few boxes I have left. And bring them out now and then and smell smoke that isn't there and hear Professor H. who isn't really there but still she is whispering, "Yes, that's it, that is exactly it."

Because there is more to say, still. Chances for resurrection through the careful ministrations of a few who help to reconstitute them, in a manner, for a few precious moments. Through an act so simple yet spiritual when it occurs. Which snaps the lost in those moments back into the sun and wind and rain. Into the fullness like a patchwork quilt long folded and gathering dust in the shadows. Allowing them breath and the full measure of their absolute vibrance.

It is happening now. You are making it so. Because you are here, reading these words, devoting your time and your care.

These are last portraits. And sometimes, through the long missing of the lost, they are finally what they should have been all along and us with them.

Shimmering, exquisite, cherished. Loved.

And through it all, ever remembered.

In Venice, Eyes of Wonder

2009-09-27T20:33:00.000-07:00

I arrived sleepless in Italy, greeted by long security lines and dogs sniffing for drugs and explosives. But the brilliant Venetian sun, magnified by the sea, hypnotized me the moment I stepped from the airport. It sent me reeling. I made my way to the dock where I settled into a water taxi and before I was ready the craft had dispatched me to the canal-side hotel.

I buried myself in the work. These were not happy days. The marriage was not going well, to put it mildly, and I did not know what to do about that. Divorce was out of the question, I thought. At 34, I felt old before my time, shriveled, absent from myself.

So, on the first day of the conference, I stared sulking from a window while the techs tried to make the computers work. I glanced down to see a couple of heavily armed soldiers watching. One was gesturing to me. Was I in trouble? Leaning on something forbidden? I looked closer. He was blowing kisses. The other was smiling, broadly. I blushed! I laughed. I returned the air kiss.

Venice had only begun to charm. In the mornings, I got up early and made my way to the conference site. Strains of opera drifted from alleyways. Had someone left on the stereo and a window open? Was an opera singer up early, practicing? No, I was being serenaded by the garbage collector.

And my commute. No road rage, no packed underground subways. I walked from my hotel to St. Mark’s Square, where I boarded a vaporetto that cruised on the water to the conference site on the Lido. At night, I returned the same way. The gentle rocking, the sweet mesh of waves in the lagoon washing away every last vestige of workday frustration.

By that hour, I was more than ready for the Venetian night. For enjoying the friends I was rapidly meeting. For adventures in food. The food, northern Italy’s pure flavors, unsullied by layers of sauce or other attempts to gild the lily. I will never forget this food and crave it to this day. Only once, in Chicago, in a small, quiet restaurant that a young nephew led us to, have I ever come close.

I walked and walked and walked. At home, I am known for having a terrible sense of direction, being constantly lost. But in Venice, I knew where to go, by instinct. Some streets in the city of bridges and dark, twisty passages weren't marked at all, or if they were, the signs probably were from half a century ago, I was told. Directions rarely made sense. Maps quickly became outdated.

But I felt confident there. So, people soon were stopping me in the street, asking for directions. Italians too. "Non parlo italiano," I was forced to confess. Often, they looked at me skeptically, then hustled away as I repeated "Scusi!" to their retreating backs.

All too soon, it was time to go. I was crushed by this. The work had been good, the food, the fellowship stimulating. And I never want to leave the water anyway. But Venice had revived me in such a way that I simply did not want to go back to my life. To the problems. To the marriage I knew in my heart of hearts would not survive.

But I packed up because I had to, could not delay another day. I had one last lovely breakfast on the small patio at the front of the hotel -- tapping the shell of the soft-boiled egg nestled in a flowered egg cup, spreading butter on the soft bread with chewy crust, pouring hot milk from a small white pitcher into a steaming cup of steaming, strong coffee.

My bags were brought down and I settled up with the front desk.

I stood there in dread. I worried my heart would grow heavy again with the same weight I had brought there. That I would lose the transfusion of life Venice had given me.

And then it happened.

A young man who worked at the hotel, who barely spoke English, rushed to me in the moment before I stepped into the boat holding steady in the canal at the side of the hotel.

“Signora?” he said.

“Yes?”

“You are leaving?”

"Yes."

And in that moment, he brought forward the arm he had been holding behind his back. In his hand was a bouquet of tiny pink roses. Shyly, he handed them to me.

I did not know what to say. This young man had waited on my colleagues and me a couple of days at breakfast. I practiced the few words of Italian I had learned with him, encounters that lasted minutes in all. We had barely spoken. He was quite young. I looked around, thinking he had made a mistake, that he wanted to give the flowers to someone else. But who really? I had seen people leave throughout my stay and had seen no flowers.

In the end, I could say only one thing, since I did not speak his language and he barely spoke mine. And there was no time.

I said “grazie. They are beautiful.” Over and over I said this. I held out my hand and he took it and we stood for a moment. He bowed at the waist and helped me into the vessel. And the craft sputtered and strained, slicing through the canals and the foam, into the saltwater lagoon and finally the sea.

I held onto the roses for dear life. Through the boat ride, onto the airplane. I clutched them as we hurtled through the air to Paris, on another leg of my temporary assignment abroad. I was meeting my husband there, and forgive me, but the truth is I was not looking forward to that.

The roses held me together, somehow. A floral embrace, they kept me floating in the sun, water and music of an ancient, sinking city where I took my first full breath in many years. Where I saw myself in a mirror and for a moment did not recognize myself because I was so caught up in the full flush of marvel. And where, simply and unexpectedly, for a short time but more than enough, I was looked upon again with the freeing, glorying, rejuvenating eyes of wonder.

Lies I Told Myself

2009-09-18T22:32:00.000-07:00

I forgot most of the truth I knew by the time I graduated from college. My recovery took a long time even to begin. And it is still a work in progress.

I made up ridiculous things and believed them. For instance, during one of our heated moments, I told Mother that she was "afraid of life." I was in my early 20s and on my way to Paris on vacation, which caused a spat I won't detail. She was wrong about some things, but not others, and if I had remembered even a few truths, I could have saved myself and others a great deal of heartache down the road.

This is what I said during our heated scene: "You and Daddy don't know anything about the world. You hide from it. You are afraid of life."

They knew plenty about the world. Mother, 89 now, admits she doesn't care much for change. She's not alone in that. But the truth is her actions did not teach me or anyone else to shrink from the world.

Take the blue holes, for instance.

My siblings and I learned to swim in rivers and creeks. Mother got us acclimated to the water early, even when the water wasn't really warm. She held us aloft on outstretched arms and talked us through the stroking and kicking. After a certain amount of time, none of us yet school age, Daddy led us into the middle of golden green water rippling in sunlight that threaded through trees lining muddy banks. And he let us go.

We thrashed violently, went under, swallowed water, coughed and screamed. Then instinct and self-preservation took over. As Daddy walked backwards, eyes carefully on bobbing heads, we grasped desperately for the hands he held out just beyond our reach, then triumphantly as the instructions from Mother kicked in and our brains connected with limbs. At last, we were swimming.

Even then, in rural Alabama, there were swimming pools around. But why flail around in small concrete tubs of chemicals when so much sweet natural abundance was available. We never knew what we would find at creeks, rivers and lakes, which were alive with possibility. A heavy summer rain made the water run swift and hard, while a dry spell meant lazy drifting on inner tubes.

A day on the living water never yielded the same result. Were the little round eggs I found peeking from the side of a sandy creek bank snake eggs or turtles? And that little dark snake bobbing his way toward me over the tiny rapids -- poisonous or not? Best to run first and ponder it out later.

And the rope swings and grape vines. Think of it -- holding onto one of these, we would take a running jump and soar from a cliff or bank over the vast water many feet below and then drop. It was exhilarating, making that first jump and surviving. Then climbing up the banks to the top, swinging out over and over again, dropping endlessly into the dark, cold water below.

There were no life guards to keep us from doing senseless things. So we learned to self-police, to look out for each other, to administer first aid with what we had on hand. We kept injuries from our parents and took care to minimize bloody evidence so we could go back. I still carry scars from cuts that should have been stitched up.

So, raised on creek, lake and river swimming practically from birth, we always wanted to explore new ones when traveling. "Mother, can we find a creek today? A river maybe?" She almost always obliged.

More than once, she showed us what she was made of on these trips.

I remember scrambling from the back of a car deep in the Tennessee wilds, bent on beating everyone to the water's edge. I ran clutching a towel, long grass whipping arms and legs, bare feet slapping the cold, hard dirt path.

I heard them before I saw them. Low, coarse voices, curses, a laugh, something making a fast jittery clicking. I stopped, the sweat on my upper lip, neck, forehead running cold.

Men blocked the trail. They wore overalls and rumpled work clothes, squatted, slouched in and around the path, their faces mostly covered by straw hats, crumpled up cloth ones. Some were yelling at a pair of dice on the ground. And nearly all were holding or drinking or wiping backs of dusty hands across mouths after sipping from canning jars filled with clear liquid.

They glared at the girl who had interrupted them. Their break from harsh labor, or forgetting about none to be found, mouths to feed, of the pious and rules they never wanted and chafed under. For a few stolen hours under the cover of brush near a creek nobody bothered to go to much anymore. Until that afternoon. Until that shivering little pest of a girl.

I turned to run, calling for Mother. My voice high and breaking. But Mother, walking a brisk pace in front of her niece, who had also brought her children, did not break stride. She kept her eyes on the water. She was comfortable there and would not be intimidated. She had grown up in that countryside, roaming with older brothers and her childhood friend Bish. Bish, who asked her to marry him before going off to fight against Hitler. But he didn't come back. His plane ditched in the English Channel and he drowned.

That day, Mother brushed by me and walked straight on the path. I remember grabbing her skirt tail, something I had not done for years, probably pushing my sister away from her traditional position. My grown cousin walked behind in silence with her four little children, one of them a baby.

I should not have been surprised by Mother's nonchalance. It had been only recently that a man acting a fool menaced our car on the back roads of Tennessee. The man's car hit ours in the back. I remember being very afraid as Mother pulled over, got out and went to inspect. The man got out of his car and snarled. He was wiry thin, in jeans and cowboy boots. And I could smell the whiskey a car length away.

Then she turned to him. "Why did you hit my car?" A look of surprise on his face and the bluster dissolved. She told him there was no damage. She would not be calling the police or the insurance company. On one condition: That he go home immediately and lay off the bottle. "Yes m'am," he said over and over, "I shorely am so very sorry, m'am, just beggin' yore pardon, m'am." Then he mentioned he was grateful Jesus had spared them from injury and damage. Which was enough. And Mother drove us away.

With that same resolve, she held steady at the sun-dappled creek. She kept her eyes on the water, which was just hidden by lush green foliage in a Middle Tennessee made even more luminous by summer.

Seeing her, the men suddenly began to move away from the path, hats came off, fruit jars wordlessly whisked from sight. Several nodded to Mother as we passed, others averted their eyes. She nodded back, ever so slightly moving her head.

But she kept her eyes on the water and hustled everyone ahead of her, following along last.

Maybe someone recognized Mother. She had been gone from Tennessee only a few years at that point.

But she wasn't about to be thwarted from her day at the creek. Not because she wanted to swim. I've never seen her in the water except when she was teaching us. I think now she was intent on making sure we could swim in all conditions, even in colder weather sometimes, to make sure we could handle it. She said Bish's drowning made no sense, that he was an excellent swimmer. She may have wondered whether the cold killed him.

And it's funny, my brother built a house on a creek bank, another on a lake. I go to the water every chance I get. It breathes life into me when I've hit bottom. And when I'm happy, it is the first thing I think of, getting to the water, I breathe easier there, in every way.

When Mother goes, she sits and watches, like I do. Her eyes scan the landscape, settling on small bobbing waves, then moving down into the depths. She is drawn to the water because she has been searching all these years.

And I understand now, finally, that she is waiting. And that she is most certainly not afraid

A Cat, Crosses, And Moonlight

2009-09-06T17:53:00.000-07:00

I wasn't going to tell this story, ever, I banished it more than 30 years ago. But last week at dinner, I told S. we had gone to a restaurant that felt haunted, which shifted the talk to ghost stories. J. tuned us out, so there it was, without warning, looming in my mind's eye. The old resistance was abruptly worn away.

So I'm sitting now with the filmy shawl I wear when I need comfort draped across my shoulders, skimming my bare arms, partly wrapped around my wrists. I rustled around searching for it before I started the telling. Even though I wasn't cold. I needed it because I was beginning to shiver just a bit, a fine, barely perceptible tremor in my very core.

This story happened in college. Sophomore year, a late fall night, but still so humid it felt like the middle of summer. I was alone in the dorm room. I hadn't seen much of my roommate for a while. We had active social lives. Plus, I didn't care for her boyfriend one bit, and she knew it.

Then she came back to the room. She was rattled. Accustomed to her dark moods, I spoke, but mostly ignored her, probably studied or pretended. It had gotten late and I remember getting ready for bed.

She didn't want me to turn out the light.

She was leaning back on the bed, chain-smoking. Her mile-long legs pulled up, clasping her knees close to her chest with her arms. We had the mattresses on the floor, as was the custom then. I sat on my bed, which was near hers. And asked her why.

"It's not good," she said, her deep voice cracking. Too many long, thin Kools. It was then I noticed. She pushed her long, thick black hair away from her face with a thumb, dark eyes glittering, her face even paler.

She told me she'd spent the day at a farm with the boyfriend who gave me the creeps. "You're not going to believe me," she said, but the stress pushed her thick drawl into a jittery pace I had to strain to understand. "I swear I met a warlock."

I took a deep breath. Okay... here we go. We'd talked about this kind of thing. Laughed about it. We both had messed around with Ouija Boards as kids, scared ourselves at sleepover seances. But she been raised in a fundamentalist household like mine. We ditched those churches the second we got to college. But still, we didn't believe in witchcraft. Did we?

Then she started to talk.

The warlock was real, she insisted. He focused on her like a laser. He lived at the farm with a woman, a witch. He kept talking to her, though. She was special. She had talent, potential. He wanted to see her, to spend time with her. She felt like he was seeing right through her. Like he was hypnotizing her. He was mesmerizing, and she couldn't turn away, from his eyes. He was charming and hypnotic and at the same time horrifying and evil.

She felt as though she was in the room with the devil himself.

Whoa, hold on, time out. She kept talking fast, dropping to a whisper, and I was having trouble keeping up. But I told her that could not be real, the warlock thing. He was making it up, having a laugh on them all, making fun of the girl from the country. He was not for real.

Then she told me something she had not shared in all our late-night dorm talks. Her dabbling had been more than sleepover fodder with girlfriends. She'd gotten in deeper, with other friends from school. She asked did I remember a murder a couple of years back, strange circumstances? Yes, of course I did. Well, she wasn't there, she had nothing to do with it. But that girl got in even deeper than all of them, died in a spell gone bad.

She was crying then. And suddenly I was cold, freezing in fact, and aware for the first time in a very long time that I was so very far from home. I could see the newspaper in my mind and remembered the story, the girl my age, her body found cold and alone in a dark shed. Candles, there were candles surrounding the body. Black candles. Her boyfriend had been arrested. Case closed.

I reminded her of that. Humans, not the supernatural, were involved there. And she had encountered the same situation out at the farm. All she had to do was not go back. Simple. Another case closed. Time for bed.

And then I heard it. A cat. Meowing loudly, yowling. Just outside the window. I could not believe what I was hearing. It just could not be. I got up and ran to the window.

And there it was. In the light of a nearly full moon, a large black cat, glowing green eyes, sitting underneath our dorm window howling at us.

"Get away!" I hissed through the screen. "You get away! Scat!" The cat didn't move. "I MEAN IT GET AWAY!" The window was open. I slammed it shut. The cat hunkered down. It was uncanny. I pulled the drapes. V. was in a panic, again she was crumpled against the wall on her bed, face in her hands.

"It's him, he's here, he's come for me," she whimpered.

"The hell he is," I said. Some words to that effect, I don't remember exactly because I was furious. I didn't really believe the cat was, well, him, the warlock, or whatever. But she believed the warlock had somehow appropriated the cat's visage for the evening. Or become one, or something, I'm a little fuzzy on that one still. But I definitely was spooked by her reaction. I also was sleep-deprived. And I was (am) superstitious enough to not want to take chances.

So I knew exactly what to do.

I had a small cross necklace in a jewelry box. I dug it out. I placed it on the windowsill. "Good trumps evil," I told her, looking grave for the first time that night. "Always. You know that." I knew K. would not be home (they didn't call her "late date K. for nothing). But she never remembered to lock her door. So I ran up the stairs and nosed around. She's Catholic, I knew she wouldn't let me down and she didn't. I found several armaments.

I placed those crosses on the windowsills too. And I dusted off the bible my mother sent me to college with and read from it: "I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep: for thou, Lord, only makest me dwell in safety." Psalm 4:8

I didn't believe the cat was a warlock, I told V., but I was cloaking us in the Lord's armor so she could sleep. She wrapped herself in her long back cape and stretched out on her bed. I slept in my clothes, ready to throw out another layer of prophylatic spiritual fencing, if need be. But I remember sleeping hard, unaccosted by cats or warlocks or bad dreams.

My roommate and I did other some strange things as we grew up in the coming years. But we never warred against alleged witches-warlocks-cats or even talked about that night again.

Yet, to this day, I've given cats a wide berth. I don't for a second think they are evil. But now and then a certain black cat will remind me of that night. Often, the cats just hate being ignored and make a beeline for me. And I like to one up them at being, well, cats.

Thinking about that night, I watch them from the corner of my eye until I'm absolutely certain we've not made acquaintance in another time and place, under an almost full moon.

Certain we haven't, my hand moves toward my neck -- is the cross there or in my purse? No church owns me, I don't even go now, but the weapons and armor were burned into me decades ago. If something scary ever decides to show, I'm up for the fight.

Forever Out of Reach

2009-08-30T16:40:00.000-07:00

Last week I strolled into a hobby shop, looking for glass bottles for the wire art I never get around to making anymore. The garrulous owner was sitting with his back to me and thought I was someone else and cursed -- or so he said, I didn't hear that. I was already not listening. Because I sensed with a physical chill that something was happening.

I found something in that shop, which evoked a series of memories. And a startling realization I wouldn't have made otherwise.

I knew it before I even saw. The place was filled with models of planes, cars, ships, trains. The owner was apologizing for his language, saying he was really "so very sorry m'am..." but again I could not keep up with the patter because I was looking for it, something I'd been in search of for decades.

His cohort came in, the curses subject, maybe in jest, although maybe not because this man was carrying a pizza, so I put a stop to the apologies with an abrupt, "But do you have Flakbait by any chance, the B-26 bomber?" I didn't need to explain. I knew this would separate the wheat from the chaff.

And it did. The shop had nothing to do with bottles and wire art and the like. But it carried a nice, large model Flakbait at quite a decent price, the plane my father flew in during World War II in Europe. The one he served in as a gunner-engineer. The plane pocked by enemy fire that had been in the Smithsonian for a while, cut in half so I could stare inside through the plexiglass, take my son there, my son who never met his grandfather. But they took the plane away and stored it somewhere in Virginia, I lost track of it. And when they did that I lost that piece of my father too.

But last week, after that strange encounter in a distant strip mall I seldom visit, I walked out of the shop cradling in trembling arms the beautiful, detailed replica of that plane. And the owner gave me a discount, unasked. "Because you have a connection to the plane. And your father was a hero."

I will eventually give the plane to my son, who never met his grandfather. But not now. I want to keep it for myself, he is a teenager and won't appreciate the gift. And I need it. Because this collection of metal and plastic does not conjure up the romance of an era for me, heroism, the simple days of war for the "right" reasons. Instead, it evokes a mystery.

These days, with him gone for nearly 20 years, I am edging closer to that inaccessible part of the man, even though I know he will forever remain for the most part undisclosed. He was not one for introspection, self-analysis. He was happiest when in motion, outdoors, in action. But somehow, I am compelled to try to piece together bits of the mystery. Because in the missing, maybe I will find the lost measure of the man.

Why? "You are just like him," echoes in my head sometimes. It isn't true. It never was. Or maybe it was, before. Not now. Maybe, in ways. It's a muddle. Like life.

I will not start at the beginning. But in the middle.

We were not a musical household, but my sister and I took piano lessons. As my playing improved, my father became interested. He had not cared as my sister and I banged out chords and early pieces. But as I began to play the very simplest classical, he would come into the room and sit on my bed.

I was surprised by this. Although my father occasionally listened to Schumann, and tried to interest us in the composer, our house was usually filled with a cacophony of noise from the televisions and radios my father and brother set up to obessessively follow their sports teams and whoever else was playing in the universe. Also, just the general background noise from five people in one house.

On the nights I played, my father got very quiet. He sat and stared into the distance. And then, as though spent, he would stretch out on the bed. Sometimes, when I finished and turned to look at him, his hand would be on his head, shielding his eyes, as though in pain. And I thought I could see his eyes glistening. Tears?

He said, by way of explanation, that "they played this music in London, in Ireland, during the war. It was in the pubs and the restaurants. Not like here."

My mother and father raised us in north Alabama, where old gospel twined with the high, sad lament of Hank Williams drenched us through the pores. Sprinkled with drops of bluegrass. Then, as I grew older, this was layered, lavishly, with Motown, jazz, the blues. Not classical.

My mother seemed to be agitated by his behavior about the piano music. I didn't understand why. I felt she was blaming me, somehow, for something. She hovered, darting through the house, her tensions rendering me silent and fearful in one moment, then overly loud and brash in the next, characteristics that have propelled me through life. I stopped playing soon after, but that's another story, not part of this one.

The actual fact of the war was not something my father yearned for, that I know. It was horrible. He rarely spoke of it. He calculated where to drop the bombs. Then went into the bubble and fired turret guns. After surviving many missions, crash landings, deaths of comrades, woundings of airmen next to him, men he helped get to the ground alive with rudimentary medic's skills, he refused the offer of an air transport back to the United States. Instead, he returned home by boat. And he refused to board a plane for 40 years.

"I know I could smell the gasoline. You're not supposed to on an airliner. But once they turned on the engines, I know it would happen," he would say. He finally did, to visit me in Baltimore. Which freed him to travel to WWII reunions in distant places before his death. He loved them.

But there was one reunion I am left wondering about, a reunion he never had. The woman he loved in England, during the war. The woman who corresponded with my grandmother, whose address was in family bible. My father never spoke of her, but after he died, my mother did.

My father did not know my mother before the war. He knew her brothers and even her fiance, who was killed in that war along with one of her brothers. My father came home from that war and sat down beside my mother on a bus. They started talking and realized the common ties, and griefs. Before long, they were engaged. And married.

Soon after, my father handed my mother a letter. It had been forwarded by his mother in Tennessee. We were living in Texas then, where my sister and I were born. The letter was from his former lady love in England. It was unopened.

My father said his mother told him there was talk about the Englishwoman coming to the United States to visit, or maybe she was already here -- New York, New Jersey, details were fuzzy. My mother clearly was not happy, many years later, discussing these details. She told me my grandmother "really liked this Englishwoman," even though they never met. My father had no plans to open the letter. "You are my wife. I'll let you decide what to do with it."

My mother took the letter and threw it away. Unread, unopened. They never discussed it again.

I wondered about that, late at night, staring at Flakbait, watching it carefully for clues that night after bringing it home from the shop. Did my father leave London planning to send for his love later? Had they broken up? Had it been unresolved? So many questions.

I think about this woman. Her letter refused, thrown away. Maybe she jilted my father.

It hit me then. That's who he was thinking about, the woman from England. As I played that handsome old upright piano, verging on young womanhood, he sat in my room, tears filling his eyes, staring into the distance, traveling in part of his mind over the vast ocean to other rooms filled with music quite like that. In another country, another life, another war. The tears were about loss.

For what had been, for what could have been. He was not a man who looked back, who regretted. But for those few times, for a few minutes, I am sure of it -- he did.

My sister has my grandmother's bible. I badgered her until she retrieved it from safe place and carefully paged through the fragile pages to the thing I wanted. She read it to me over the telephone. The Englishwoman's address. I wrote it down. I look at it and read it out loud to myself now and then.

Where is she now? Did she have a family? Was she responsible, caring, honorable, someone who took good care of her family? And despite those things, did she still have another quality her family puzzled over. The same as I do now: A vast, inaccessible space unknown and unknowable, forever out of reach.

Men, Guns and a Reckoning

2009-08-25T07:12:00.000-07:00

The road between my house and Y's was the Grand Canyon of prohibition. My parents quietly forbade us to step foot in that yard. And her folks reciprocated, with outrage and bluster. But the line of demarcation was breached, frequently, with stealth. And then with courage.

When Y's family moved in across the dirt and gravel road, we were happy to see girls our age spill from the car with Georgia plates. My father was uneasy. He had bought land adjacent and behind our rural Alabama home -- woods property -- and considered the acreage across the road. We had lived for a while in a Texas city where my sister and I were born, but my father was unhappy there, caged, he needed wide open spaces.

However, he also was the kind of man who saved 30 cents for every dime he made. He never bought on credit. So he had hesitated about buying the extra land, and was too late.

Then came the new neighbors. They set to work tidying, planting bushes and flowers. They were friendly. They didn't have a telephone, not many did in that time and place, so from time to time they would politely ask to use ours. And relatives would call them too.

Nosy by nature, I flattened myself on the floor and listened through a crack in the bottom of a closed door. The calls were to and from relatives, made and answered by both the parents and Y, who at 8 was already a surrogate parent to her younger siblings. They reported "everything's good!" No, nothing needed, assurances lavishly given. This was a blended family, as it is called today. Y's biological father lived elsewhere. But the telephone calls should have been a red flag, my mother said later. That this move was one of many new starts after times of trouble.

And the trouble started soon.

The parents dodged invitations from locals to attend church. Okay fine, my hometown is gentle, people are allowed to just be. Then my parents spotted the beer cans. Red alert.

Back then, this rural village was not the kind of place where people walked around showing off their alcohol habits. A flask tucked away in a back pocket was fine. Wine quietly served for dinner. Signs of hangovers at the Baptist church were not unheard of, certainly. But this was different.

The parents drank. In the house and outside. Then the fights started. The mother disappeared for days and weeks on end, with other men. My parents felt they had no choice. We were forbidden to go to that house.

We got around that prohibition, of course. My sister and Y's perfected a strange cry, a cross between a bird's shriek and an Indian call. One would screech, another would respond, and the tones set us into motion. Y and her sisters would go to the woods out back, move to the cover of the tall sage. When all was clear, they would scurry across the road to the forest behind my house. Then we would meet at the swamp or one of the ponds if my parents were home. At my house if not. Or reverse.

We learned to sneak. We could work for the CIA today, thanks to these early prohibitions and the slipping around they necessitated.

The parents mostly ignored each other. Except for my father. He tipped his hat, gave a nod, said hello. He got the cold shoulder back. And worse.

When Y's father was in his cups, sometimes he would come outside, stand in his yard and yell across the road, cursing us, calling us every name in the book. But one night, his belligerence flared.

"YOU THINK YOU'RE BETTER THAN US," he yelled. "YOU AINT S@#T YOU SONS OF B##%$ES. COME OUT AND FIGHT LIKE A MAN. G#$ D#$ C's. I'LL KILL EVERY STINKING ONE OF YOU COME ON GET YOU GUN AND SHOW YOUR FACE. YOU YELLA BELLIED COWARD."

He had screamed at us before in the night. My father had ignored this. My parents were teetotalers, into their churches. My father sang in the choir, taught Sunday school, was a community leader. He had old-school manners, wore suits and commuted into work and sat at a desk. R had a good job too, worked at the same federal installation as my father. Probably made the same or similar money. But he lacked the education my father had, wore a working man's clothes. Something about this ate at our neighbor. When he drank.

But my father was a World War II veteran, an engineer and gunner on a bomber in Europe. He calculated where to release the bombs that softened up Nazi targets, acted as a medic when other men were hit by flak, held on as his wounded plane managed to make it to the ground. And he'd grown up with guns, was a hunter from childhood. He also was no stranger to drink before he married my mother and she insisted he had to give that up.

Y's father had challenged the wrong man.

Lying in my bed, pretending to be asleep, I heard the familiar sound of the skeleton key clicking on the door to my father's pine wardrobe. The door opened. And I knew he was pulling out a gun -- a shotgun, a rifle, one of them. Heavy bare feet on the floor, the front door pulled open.

I dropped to the floor, crawled to the door and hid, peeking out.

My father stood on the front steps of the porch, illuminated by moonlight. He held a shotgun, pointed toward the sky. His voice a growl, fury barely restrained, he said, "You get back inside your house. Don't make me come over there. And don't you EVER come out here and yell your filth about my family again. Or there'll never be another peep heard from you. I guarantee it." Words to that effect.

R stood next to the road. He had a gun in his hands too. He was weaving. But he stopped dead in his tracks. He turned around, quickly walked into his house and closed the door without a sound. The night screaming in the yard stopped. Although there was plenty of drama, the mother's old boyfriends showing up, pounding on the door, police called, ambulances. A mess.

The freeze was even colder after that. We were dead to that family. Even the girls were not friendly to us for a while. But the mother had two more children and somehow the babies caused a thaw. And then one night, the mother was gone again, and the older kids were staying elsewhere.

And someone noticed a strange, orange glow coming from behind the windows of the house across the road. I woke up, my mother shaking my shoulder. "Wake up, that house is on fire!"

My mother was terrified, afraid the fire would spread. Y's father was outside, holding his head. He was drunk. There was no real fire department in those days. Calls had been made, but we were on our own.

My father was across the Grand Canyon of roads, holding R by the arm, shouting. "Is the baby inside? Get it together man, THINK! Is the baby inside the house?" R was confused, he couldn't remember. To our horror, he said he thought the baby was in the front bedroom, the room where he had fallen asleep with a cigarette in his hand, after "a couple of beers."

That was all my father needed to hear. He and a neighbor had already rigged up hoses, trying to put out the fire. It had been too much, they were driven back. But hearing a baby could be in that room with that blaze about to roar out of control was too much for my father.

He grabbed a jacket, soaked it with water, threw it over his head and shoulders and ran back into the house. I could see him through the front windows of the house I knew so well. He made a sharp right and ran fast into that place where the flames were about to engulf the entire room.

I had my issues with my father. He was moody, too quick to anger, believed in discipline by belt. But when he ran into that fire, I was seized with an ancient terror I had never known before: The earth fell away from my feet. I could not breathe. I was so dizzy I thought I was going to faint. I saw my own life flash before my eyes.

And then he emerged from the smoke, into the night air, unhurt. There's no one in there, he said. And suddenly, among the neighbors gathering one by one on the side of the road, someone from the cluster of trailers down in the woods reported that the baby was safe with one of them, had been since early in the afternoon, when R. had dropped the child off. Clearing the way for him to start his bender.

Relief. My father and the other men sprayed water to keep damage to the house to a minimum until a fire truck finally showed up. Workmen came and helped R clear up and repair. The mother showed back up and soon the family was reunited. The same hopeful scenario that had materialized countless times across that road.

Then the mother got sick. It was bad. She died quickly, died young. The older kids scattered and R lived there with another woman and a son for years, his demons tamed by age and experience, no longer taunted by his wife's wanderings.

He still sat on the porch for hours, drinking from the ever-present beer can. But he waved, said hello. And most of the time, when my father was in the yard or driveway, R would put down his can. And through the years he started nodding, standing up even. And a couple of times, before these old adversaries died, they met on the Grand Canyon of roads and stretched out their arms and wordlessly shook hands. They never spoke about the past.

But they did not need to, their gestures after years of deep freeze and animosity said everything. Those days are over and done with. We've had losses and we've endured. I'm sorry for the trouble. Thank you. It's time to settle the scores, neighbor.

They were bidding each other goodbye.

The Secret In A Handbag

2009-08-19T07:44:00.000-07:00

Aunt Re grew African Violets, old-fashioned and predictable, like her. Or so we thought. Until she died and my mother found, in an old handbag, a secret kept tucked away for three-quarters of a century.

Re was a feisty young woman, quick with a sharp comeback. She had many brothers and held her own with them. She taught herself to play the piano and loved it, spent hours picking out tunes, singing and playing ragtime, jazz.

Then tuberculosis struck. There was no cure then. Far out in the country, where the air was clear and clean, she stayed for a year in bed. She got better. Then she relapsed. But the second time the medicines existed to finally whip the scourge and she fully recovered.

But she was never the same, my mother said. The nervous energy was gone. She was sweet and loving, infinitely patient. She had wanted children, but couldn't have them. So she and her husband, who had also survived TB, became surrogate parents for their many nieces and nephews. She always seemed so happy when we were around. Laughing, joking, loving. She had a childlike quality, clear, wrinkle-free skin that just did not age. Flawless, like her African Violets.

But she grew quiet at times, too. Staring into the distance with deep blue eyes. It took several tries to break through that silence. A touch, a child's embrace.

She was the weakest physically of her large hearty clan. But lived until age 96, finally beaten by a series of strokes that left her unable to speak, hear, talk. She drifted into a coma, finally, and then was gone.

It took months and quite a few relatives to clear out and distribute her possessions. She was a saver, sentimental. She kept so many pictures of us, old letters and notes. I was quite prolific and had no memory of that. "DEAR AUNT RE: I love you. J. was outside when she wasn't supposed to, fell and hit her head. Please can you come visit? I really want you to. PLEASE!" I scrawled these in childish hand.

Even so, my mother, her younger sister, wasn't prepared for what she found in an old purse tucked away in some boxes. Inside this handbag was a book that concealed an envelope. Inside was a letter. A very old letter.

It was written by a man my aunt had known when she was young. My mother vaguely remembered the man's name. There had been talk of this man, but she was 10 years younger, so the information had not really stayed with her. Until she found this letter.

My aunt and this man, so young then, had planned to marry. But times were hard, it was the Great Depression, and he was unable to find work. So he had to leave their small middle Tennessee community. He was determined. He would find something, anything, and would settle down there. Then he would send for her. They would marry, start a new life.

But the letter said it all. In a few short lines, the man reported finding work. But he also found someone else to love. He was sorry, but it couldn't be helped. He was marrying this person. He was sorry. But he was saying goodbye.

I can see my beautiful, delicate aunt now -- thick black hair, small-boned. Her big blue eyes, fringed with black eyelashes, filling with tears. Then carefully refolding the letter, inserting it into a book and putting it away. Getting on with life, as she did always.

And never forgetting the silent ache concealed in a handbag deep within a closet. Evidence of a broken heart that endured for nearly a century.

The Big White Dog

2009-08-16T13:17:00.000-07:00

This is a dog story, strangely enough. I haven't had a pet for years. But three big white dogs have been significant in my life, the first when I was a little girl. This is the story of the first one. It's scary, so hold on tight.

When my family visited relatives in middle Tennessee, we stopped first at my paternal grandmother's house in town. My brother and father always stayed there. After a visit, my mother, sister and I would head deep into the countryside, down a narrow dirt road, to stay with the other side of the family.

In town, I had a routine. I would scramble up trees in the front yard to see whether the pennies and other small treasures I'd left in hollowed out pockets were still there. Then I'd scoot out onto a limb, hold on with both hands, ease my seat into space and roll backwards. Hanging on by my legs, crooked at the knee, I would swing back and forth. Hands and arms relaxed and dangling, sometimes I hung on with only one leg.

My grandmother fussed. "I wish you wouldn't do that," she would call in a high-pitched, agitated voice. "I just know you'll fall and break your neck," So eventually, a parent would order me to stop. "You are are worrying your grandmother half to death," my mother would say.

Eventually, I found another pasttime. A risky venture that no one knew I was pursuing -- a sheer rock bluff, a straight drop from a cliff behind my grandmother's house down to rocks, gravel and a highway.

Pleased with myself, I would wait quietly for the grownups to be distracted, then slip off, climb the barb-wire topped fence and push through trees and bushes. I would look around to make sure I was alone, turn my back to the bluff and crouch. Then I would start down, one foot first, then another, holding onto grass with fists to keep steady.

I was wary at first, but grew more confident each time. When I ran into obstacles I could not negotiate, I would climb back up and go at it from another angle.

I enjoyed the challenge of the climb. But I was more attracted to the thrill of hanging from the bluff, buffeted by the wind, watching cars go by below. I tried not to glimpse the sharp rocks that would surely be the last thing I would see if I slipped. Because I loved the feeling I got from that bluff, my body plastered on rock and dirt, embraced by the wind and the sun, suspended in a secret place.

Then one day, hanging from the bluff, it happened. A rock glanced off the cliff next to me and ricocheted to the bottom. Then another, this one larger and much closer to me. I remember being angry, thinking my older brother had found me and was pretending to try to hit me with rocks.

But the face I saw watching me from above wasn't my brother's. It was a boy about my age, someone I had never seen. The bone-thin face, slits for eyes, close-cropped hair, was grinning maniacally, and he held a huge rock in both hands over his head. He threw that at me. I ducked, it missed. He didn't have the best aim, an outcropping of rock was protecting me. I yelled at him to stop, but he laughed, a shrill, nasty laugh. Then he started moving to another position on the top of the cliff, one allowing him a better aim.

I went cold. This is it, I thought. I'm not going to lose my balance and fall on my own, this awful boy is going to kill me for fun. I pressed myself as flat as I could into the cliff face. My mind went blank. Until I heard a commotion from above. Some muted scuffling in the grass, the boy's angry voice, then finally footfalls, running.

Someone has saved me, I thought.

But still, I heard nothing from above. When I finally could force my shaky limbs to move, I climbed back up the cliff. No one was there. Nothing.

I lunged over the fence, head darting, looking out for the boy. Something had intervened and stopped him. But I couldn't see anyone.

Then I saw the white dog. He was alert, ears high, watching me from the back of my grandmother's neighbor's house, near the back porch. She didn't have a dog that I knew of, neither did my grandmother. I'd never seen this one.

He ran toward the front yard, ducked onto the porch of the big white house. So I ran after him. I got to the porch and he was gone. Nothing, no one was there.

The door opened. And Mrs. N. bid me a very warm hello. "I'm looking for a big white dog, have you seen one?" I asked, or something along those lines. She had not. No, she did not recall such a dog in the neighborhood. She knew who I was, though, had watched my siblings and me playing in the yard. She asked me in, and I accepted.

The house was full of carpets and antiques, mirrors, lace, lush curtains. She had me sit down in the front parlor and gathered up refreshments in the kitchen. These she served from a silver tray, on china, with silver cutlery.

She started asking questions, about me. Freed from certain death only minutes earlier, I talked, and talked and talked. She listened intently. A grownup listening! Interested! I was enamored, my cliff horror ebbed away.

I never told my parents about what happened on the cliff. I would have been punished and severely restricted for my foolishness. I also never saw the boy or the white dog again. I couldn't imagine the dog stopped the evil boy from throwing rocks. It seems unlikely, although someone or something did. There was one place in the fence that had been torn away and the dog could have easily maneuvered through that.

But whatever happened, the dog led me to Mrs. N., and that established a new pasttime for the visits to my grandmother's. Instead of running to the cliff, I made my way to her. After telling her my news -- silly stories about other children, teachers, fights with siblings -- she would talk. Her stories were those of a lonely old woman who needed a friend too. And she found a willing listener in the middle child from Alabama who so obviously irritated the grandmother next door with too much energy and exuberance, especially compared to the quieter siblings whose company she preferred.

Mrs. N. did not treat me as a child. She would stare into the distance, her face twisted in grief, and talk about her husband's long, agonizing death from pneumonia during a time when medicine could not save him. She could not get over this, her inability to keep death at bay, her tortured nights trying to ease his suffering. I remember her voice, specific details of his death, as though we talked only last week.

Even as a young child, I was honored to bear witness to her pain. She had granted me entrance into the carefully locked and barred world of grownup suffering. And, I am convinced, she kept me from causing more with my wild forays on the cliffs, an adventure that was certain, in time, to end in tragedy.

Mrs. N. and the white dog. The first of three big white dogs. The one who made it possible to recognize the ones who came after.

The Man With A Lion Heart

2009-08-14T09:48:00.001-07:00

I was online studying some fetching photographs taken by a talented Englishman, a former policeman who loves spending time in Greece. And these details coalesced into a hook that dipped into my brain, bringing back a distinct image of someone I knew years ago.

At first glance, P.S. could have been a casting agent's idea of an Edwardian bank clerk in London, given the right clothes of course. But that demeanor was a disguise. Confoundingly, beneath the quiet, serious, bookish-seeming exterior beat the heart of a lion, an Alpha male of the highest order.

When I met him, P. was a foreign correspondent and I was an editor. We all worked insane hours. In the United States, overnight was often the busiest shift because of the time difference.

While most of Washington, D.C., slept, my colleagues and I powered through the night on adrenaline highs fueled by vats of coffee and bad food from a dive downstairs frequented by prostitutes, small-time criminals, the occasional beat cop and us.

I stumbled upon a website recently that revealed that P. is working for a U.N. group that feeds hungry children in Africa. But until then I had imagined him still in Beirut, where he was posted in the 1980s. That impossible place of civil war, bombs and assassinations, routine artillery shelling, warships offshore. Death and chaos. And P.S. was thoroughly, thrillingly alive there.

He was on a mission, to see and understand the madness. To write about it, share it with the world. To see it through to the end.

Western correspondents were being kidnapped and murdered. Still, P. roamed the divided city. He had a daft notion, or claimed he did, that being British protected him, that he wasn't an American, the main targets. Of being invincible.

He told surreal tales of driving through streets that war had made into tunnels of rubble, vehicles and debris flaming on both sides. To gather reports for dispatches, P. and a colleague made mad dashes through the hellish landscape in an old VW with the Doors' "The End" endlessly blaring from a tape. "This is the end, my beautiful friend."

He scared us back in D.C. We fretted and worried and insisted to our bosses that P. be pulled from Beirut, be forced to leave. We demanded, we lectured, bothered him with messages and telexes and pleaded with him on the telephone when we could get through to him. Those awful pictures of hostages being brutalized, we couldn't bear to think of P. being one of them.

He resisted. He argued. He wanted to stay. Beirut was his story.

Finally, his government ordered all citizens out of the country. We were relieved. P. spent some time in D.C. and then worked from Cyprus and other posts. Several years later I ran into him again at another news agency. He was a desk jockey (an editor), married, seemingly tamed. He looked exactly the same, but I barely recognized him. The old bristling energy scarcely contained behind a misleading fake facade of calm was no longer there.

I realized how wrong we had been to try to tamper with P.'s destiny. We were worried about ourselves, really. We didn't want to feel guilty or upset if something happened to P. Our concern was personal, and selfish.

And I learned another lesson from P. I finally understood not to judge a book by its cover, one of the oldest cliches in the history of social interaction. But P. was the living embodiment of that lesson.

He was a man of average size, bespectacled, with short hair neatly trimmed, always in a non-descript blazer and tie. And he carried himself with a quiet that kept an effective disguise over his inner truth. Because this was his real story: Beneath the deceptive veneer was the heart and soul of a being at home in jungles, both natural and man-made, that jar most of us to the bone to even think about.

I have not seen or spoken to P.S. in years. But it comforts me to know he is in Africa in close proximity to his own kind, the mighty hearts, lions left to follow their own natures, on savannahs roaming wild and free.

A House Cursed

2009-08-08T17:41:00.000-07:00

I should have known the house was all wrong. I had a visceral dislike for it the moment I walked through the front door into the cramped dining room. But then I made a beeline for the back, to breathe, and it was there in the tiny yard shrouded in an otherwordly mist that the spell took me.

I didn't even flinch when the owner volunteered that she had a "nervous breakdown" in the little bathroom on the third floor. "Oh, the painters were here then, you know how it is when your life is disrupted," she quickly offered in an attempt at solace.

The elderly couple hadn't left for the showing of the century-old brownstone, painted pink in this case. They talked about how they fell in love with the small back yard because it reminded them of their time in Japan, the Tokyo posting. And then there was the black iron balcony framing twin French doors off the living room on the second floor. And more French doors leading from the study to a large back balcony. These doors, framed by a big clanking iron security gate, stayed open in the summer, making for sweet cross breezes.

And I have to mention the staircase that curved from the second floor to third, the one that hid the long-haired cat whose belled collar I heard every morning for weeks before I finally opened my eyes and saw his face an inch from mine. He had slipped in through the study's gated door and finally made his way up the stairs into the bedroom to stare me awake.

We had to have the house. We made an offer and it was accepted on the spot. But the cat, the breezes, the back yard didn't make up for the bad times in that house. We made the purchase in good faith after a separation, demonstrating our resolve to stay together for good, despite our problems.

But the first night we stayed there, I woke up screaming at the top of my lungs, causing several neighbors to come pouring out their back doors to see who was under horrible attack. The bedroom window was open and I had dreamed men were climbing in through the windows, menacing, evil men, intent on doing me great harm. As I screamed, these nightmare men had crawled over to me, taken my ankles and wrists in rough hands and were holding me down.

My screams finally woke me up. But I walked around in a daze for a couple of days after that nightmare. And in a way, I didn't wake up again until I left that house, and that marriage, seven years later.

One Sunday night, after a visit to see friends at their beach house in New Jersey, I was dosing on the bed. I was not really asleep, drifting really, when I heard a noise in the shadowed hallway and looked up to see a specter -- what I thought was a tall man dressed in black. He wore a tall hat. He turned his pale face toward me and I knew in an instant that this being did not wish me well and I gasped. Suddenly I was fully awake and he was no longer there.

The weekend had been so peaceful. But I was then seized with such anxiety I slept very little and during the next few months wasted away from lack of appetite. I continued to work many hours, perform at high levels, keep up a very active social life. But inside I was falling apart. Because I could not admit this, it manifested in physical symptoms. I went to doctors, who could not pinpoint a source.

Finally, a physician in the neighborhood who treated many patients from the nearby halls of Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court recognized that my problems were not physical in origin. She suggested I had perhaps had been taught from an early age to repress negative or unhappy feelings. And those situations can't always be maintained in a healthy way.

My move into an old house that needed repairs had been the trigger that caused "the pot to boil over," she surmised. She had seen it happen many times, she said, gesturing toward the government buildings. "You would be surprised. It is nothing to be ashamed of. You are in good company."

So, maybe that was it, I thought. I was relieved. At least for a while. But what I didn't tell the doctor was that my marriage was a wreck, a mistake from the beginning, and I'd known it for a long time. I was putting off that reckoning. But the walls of the house were closing in on me, especially at night, when I often awoke not knowing where I was, on my knees in the bed running my hands over the walls trying desperately to find an opening, a way out.

Maybe the marriage had spawned the menacing man in black, and the first-night nightmare.

But my personal situation had nothing to do with what happened with the elderly couple who sold us that charming rowhouse on Capitol Hill.

They told us they were moving to a house nearby that was easier to negotiate physically. The old house was three stories and they bought one that was two stories, which I thought was interesting. The husband was lame, rapidly losing his ability to walk at all when he lived in the house we bought. We did not want to pry as to the reasons and the wife was vague. She was nervous, twisting locks of hair, talking too much, too fast. She was desperate to be out of that house.

When we saw them a few months later, we were shocked. They were thriving. He was not running a race, but he was not the frail, gray, twisted man who could only shuffle a few feet. And she had blossomed. Happy, chatting with anyone who would listen, she was on her way to the hairdresser. It was as though both had found a fountain of youth.

And in a way they had. They had left that house, passed it along to someone else. A couple who suffered in silence both separately and together. I wasn't the only one with pain. My husband had been held up at gunpoint around the corner and had suffered a bizarre malady involving a debilitating pain that felt like a thick cord or band tightening around his torso. No cause was ever found. Pain pills were prescribed and eventually the symptoms went away.

Eventually, I grew to hate the house. I wanted to move. But my husband dug in his heels. He loved the house, the Hill, and wouldn't hear of it.

One thing led to another. Marriage counseling was unsuccessful. We broke up. I moved out.

Away from that house, parked on couches of friends at first, I was numb and hurting at the same time. But I was sleeping, finally, for the first time in years. And I could breathe.

Was it the house? Was it cursed in some way? Who knows. My ex moved out, remarried and by all accounts is perfectly happy.

And now and then when I'm on the Hill, I drive by that house. I slow down in the car, admire the French doors, the iron work. I remember the seductive charm of a study with a spacious balcony overlooking a hypnotic back yard that fills with morning mists and an otherwordly glow at twilight.

I almost stop, but then think better of it. Instead I step on the gas and drive quickly for the bridge over the Potomac River, another state in more than just one sense of the word. And then 10 minutes later I slow down and breathe because I have reached, with great relief, a world where the ghosts and nightmares stay away.

Wild Gratitude

2009-08-05T17:22:00.000-07:00

Frank McCourt's death brought C's house to mind. The author's stories of poverty, about being bitten by fleas in a bed crowded with siblings, sent me hurtling back to that small place nestled in a narrow curve in the road, at the edge of a creek, in danger of being overtaken by the deep woods.

That house was a magnet.

C and I were in fifth grade when her father passed away. The former school truant officer had moved his family for a better paying job. Like my father, he couldn't bring himself to settle in the city near that job, so chose a farming village near the Tennessee line. But a heart attack struck him down as he watched his two oldest sons play football. He wasn't even 40.

He left the woman he had married when she was still a girl, five bewildered children ages 3 to 14, and no money to speak of. Relatives who could have cushioned the blow were back in Tennessee. But the new life in Alabama was their dream, and she was determined to stay. Somehow she scraped by.

The house was bedlam. C's gentle mother filled the house with pets and guests, children especially, and placed no time limits on visits. We ate peanut butter and banana sandwiches, mountains of them, washed down with Kool Aid. On Saturdays, the tall, skinny widow cooked a country breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, and white gravy on homemade biscuits, puffed to perfection with soft White Lily flour.

I don't know what my parents were thinking. Sometimes all three of us, my brother, sister and I, spent entire weekends at C's house. In the summer, I seemed to be parked there pretty much fulltime. We acted like other kids in the daytime, went to the pool, tennis courts at the school, played piano and baseball.

Pale and exhausted by day's end, C's mother retired early. The two oldest brothers and mine went out with a teenage pack, to town with girlfriends before coming in late to sleep a few hours. So there in the lush green Tennessee River Valley, four girls aged 10 and 7 or so, and a little blond-haired brother who would not be ditched, headed out into a night unpierced by streetlights.

We hoarded material for small boats we put together to float down the creek that ran beside the house. These we hid away until midnight. We needed solitude for the boats, no cars on the road.

Then we found an old coffee can and hid. When a car drove by, one of us threw the can and yelled "hubcap!" This was supposed to make the driver stop, thinking he'd lost a hubcap. No one ever did. Until the night someone (not ME) threw the can with such pitiful aim that it hit the car. Then the driver was mad. He stopped. And hauled his full self out of the car cursing. We scattered into the protective thickets of the woods, into places such a big man could not negotiate.

Later we retrieved the boats. C and I, small and wiry, were captains with opposite styles. She was a stern taskmaster, barking out orders. She had two brothers and more expertise in the building arts. My parents kept me pretty closely under their thumbs at home. So at C's house, the enthusiasm and imagination I kept bottled up as a matter of course, through seemingly endlessly hours in church and other obligations, exploded out of me.

Laughing and yelling, we piled kindling into the boats, old hoisery, balled up newspapers. Then out came stashes of matches. One at a time, we placed the boats on the edge of the creek, lit the contents and pushed them off, into the water's current.

We jumped up and down, danced on the creek banks, cheered our handiwork. We stared in awe as the flames curled into the sky, spitting sparks high as a burning boat drifted down the creek, through the drain pipe, and out again past the winding country road. We were mesmerized, following as far as we could on the muddy banks, feet wet, falling in at times, keeping our eyes on the boats and on the red glow from the fire. Finally, then, even the faint orange melted into black night.

The last boat offered up to the stars, the sky and the moon, we straggled back to the house. But we weren't done. We thought somehow this pagan act would draw space aliens to the property. Older brothers encouraged this. So we would crawl out a back window onto the rock ledge of the house, halfway between ground and roof. We stood out there, flattened against the house wall, staring into the night waiting for a sign from the outer limits.

The space men never came to visit.

By then the energy was ebbing in the younger kids. Little brother might be passed out on the living room floor. And our little sisters were not far behind.

So, C. and I usually moved back outside. This time with cigarettes filched from her brothers. We sat in her mother's car in the driveway into the early morning hours, listening to the radio (WLS-Chicago had a powerful signal), smoking, pretending to inhale, talking about ditching our hometown when we grew up. We planned for the time we would no longer be children. When we could call the shots and do what we wanted. A new life.

In the cocoon of night we whispered, scanning the skies for lost space aliens, our feet streaked with dried mud from creek dancing. Breathing in sweet clean air, we celebrated water, fire and earth, a blanket of dense trees hiding us from prying eyes and rules.

Eventually we stumbled into the house and slept like kittens, four to a bed, my friend and her sister, my sister and me. We woke up in the morning scratching flea bites, mosquito bites, chiggers picked up while sitting and lying in the grass, nasties that dig in deep and resist departure.

But I never wanted to leave. Because for hours, days, nights and even weeks at a time we were free. The truth is I've never been so free, not before, not since.

Yet this isn't a lament for lost youth, a wish to go back.

It is a thank you letter, an expression of profound gratitude for having been there. Bearing witness in words for a time when the life pouring from me matched my surroundings. Young, wild, bare feet running through the creek, the deep south night soaking through my pores, into my bones and my blood. Sustaining me. Keeping me. Cradling me through the rest.

My Time in the Mental Institution

2009-07-19T11:21:00.000-07:00

In a recurring dream, I walk the halls of a sprawling mental hospital well known to me. The 19th-century institution is lined with many windows, but is dark inside. No one is trimming the old trees pressing against the building in this dream. The leaves and huge trunks crowd out the light.

But I am not caught up in a nightmare. In fact, I feel a yearning when I wake up. I would go back there for a bit, if I could. I'd like to check up on a couple of people.

After I got to college, I had a brief change of heart about my major. I decided I was a psychologist at heart. So, armed with this conviction, I signed up to volunteer at Bryce, the state mental hospital adjacent to the University of Alabama's Tuscaloosa campus.

The hospital had been named after a progressive psychiatric pioneer from South Carolina. But during the 20th century, patient levels grew and standards of care fell. In 1970, Alabama ranked last for mental health expenditures. Bryce had more than 5,000 patients living in conditions that a newspaper editor likened to a concentration camp.

It was into this I walked with great purpose -- young, innocent, full of ideals and conviction. Ready to serve.

Marching up to the imposing Italianate main hall, I saw a tiny chipmunk near some bushes. Oh, cute little thing, I thought. But then I saw the drops of blood. Did it fall? Get accidently stepped on? Then, a cat shot out of nowhere and snatched up the prey. "Stop!" I shrieked. But the cat ran with its its tiny catch to some low-lying branches and up a tree. I darted around the chipmunk's prison, lustrous with huge leaves and blooms, looking for someone to help. But not a soul was in sight.

Then reality intervened. I was a country girl. I'd seen this kind of overgrowth. I would never be able to catch the hunter cat in that thicket before it scampered up the trunk with its lair.

Calm enveloped me, like a cool wave, and I walked inside.

An assistant handed over a big metal ring of skeleton keys. She then took me through a series of hallways, unlocking and locking the connecting doors, until we reached my assignment. I was helping out in a womens wing, socializing with the patients, doing crafts if they wanted. I fired off many questions about how I could best be effective.

But there was no training. And my instructions were simple. This was saddest aspect of my time there. "The best thing you can do for them is just showing up. Just talk to them," a caregiver told me. "They are so isolated from the world."

Some of the women on the hall never spoke. I remember one, dressed colorfully, with thick, well-coiffed hair and skin a beautiful dark black. This was a woman who was cared for by someone. I sat beside her and introduced myself. Silence. No flicker of recognition that someone was speaking to her. I blithered on about myself, about her clothes, the confidence carefully banked in sociology and psych I classes trickling away, drop by drop, like the chipmunk's blood.

Then Daisy strode up, to the rescue.

A grandmotherly type, friendly, bristling with personality, she introduced herself and took me by the hand, leading me to the craft table. "Okay, what are we going to do today?" she asked. I was confused, at first. Was this a staffer?

But no, Daisy was a patient. The staffers were barely in evidence, sequestered, I thought, behind the locked doors and windows of an enclosed nurses station in the back of the room.

Daisy was out of luck. One of my accomplishments, at that juncture, had been successful crafts avoidance.

So she taught me. She laughed, talked, drew, constructed this and that out of old magazines and glue, whatever we could find. I couldn't imagine why Daisy was at Bryce. Obviously a mistake. And she did say that. She talked about being there only for a short time. Her family would be there soon to take her home, she said.

Another patient was Joyce, an artist. She was young and beautiful. Like Daisy, she was perfectly lucid. Another mistake, I thought.

She drew on planks of wood provided for her by staffers since there was no money for authentic art supplies. She talked about her family, about "being in solitary." She showed me the stark room where she had been placed, alone, for days, a small bed the only furniture. And places on the wall where she scribbled, pouring out her heart in tiny hand-writing.

I asked questions about the patients. Why was Daisy there? Why had Joyce been in confinement? I never got answers. The wing had many patients and few caregivers. I rarely saw other volunteers, or family members. Where was everyone? Where were the family members? Where were the students, a resource of thousands on the campus adjoining the facility?

Some of those questions were answered. Others were not.

One day, I was talking to another patient and Daisy began interrupting. I said, "Just a second, Daisy, I want to finish this and I'll get right back to you." Or something along those lines. The next thing I knew she was angry, rude, shouting, then rage boiled over. Before I could even process this outburst, orderlies were with us, taking her by the arms, leading her away. She wasn't there for my next visit, then she was. But she was subdued, heavily medicated.

I had failed to see that Daisy could not share me. That any attention to another person, however slight, would trigger a rage that would escalate without medical intervention.

And Joyce was not always there, either. She suffered terrible depressions. I took my childhood friend J. to see her when she visited from Auburn. They established a friendship. J., who became an award-winning teacher, the kindest soul I know, wrote to her for a good long while. She asked about Joyce for years after.

Joyce's writing and art had to do with her visions, which tortured her. She might have taken her own life without hospitalization. And sometimes she had to be protected from herself, the reason for the confinements.

Another thing I discovered: I wasn't cut out for this. The patients followed me, in a sense. They tapped ever so lightly on my shoulder at the library. I caught glimpses in deserted dorm hallways. As twilight became night, misty outlines I recognized in the distance would silence me suddenly during the long rambles K. and I loved to take all over campus. At dances, I saw patients standing in shadows. Their eyes hollow, mouths in a grimace, they watched, waited for me to come and talk to them.

I knew in my heart I could not separate, put up the boundaries that would allow a life apart. "It would eat you alive," an astute friend said. So I did not change my major. Working for my first newspaper, as a summer intern, I began the difficult process of standing apart, of not becoming emotionally involved, entangled. Of not showing emotion. Of stifling what I was feeling inside, no matter the circumstance.

I needed to protect myself, I thought.

Years later, a boss said my experience at a storied international wire agency had not impressed him. That it had been my time in the mental institution that had made me suited to dealing with the eccentric personalities drawn to the British news service we were working for at the time. He was only partly joking. And I understood what he meant.

Because any of us could step across that thin line separating the functioning from those who are not. It's really not that big a leap, or even predictable. In my opinion. Because we all have a Daisy inside -- fine one minute, wild with jealousy and rage the next. And a Joyce -- sweet and loving, artistic, but too sensitive for this world.

And if we need to kid ourselves about those matters to keep going, that's fine too.

I don't. But then I have a place I visit in a dream, as a reminder, a reality check. I walk down long corridors with a clanking set of old skeleton keys, unlocking doors all night long. I wake up and I'm a little sad.

But then I'm out in the world, where the sun shines and I can go where I want, anytime, with people I love. And that's enough. For today, that's plenty.

The Birdy Weekend: Part 2

2009-07-16T06:44:00.000-07:00

I didn't tell all in my Birdy post. Putting everything down then felt like too much. So this is a P.S. of sorts.

But please read the previous, "Birdy's Lesson." Also, for the full meal instead of a taste, "A Boy's Long Strange Path Here" on May 24.

So, to recap, we visited Birdy only a few weeks before she left this vale of tears. She was cheerful. She whispered to me that her cherished mother, long dead, had been calling her on the telephone. Then in the dark night, in the old farmhouse where no streetlight penetrated the deepset windows, Birdy's mother paid a visit to her old bedroom.

Perched on the foot of the bed, clad in a white nightgown, the lady of the hair watched me, seemed about to speak. Then I woke up and she vanished. A few weeks later, Birdy passed away. Before she died, though, something amazing happened. One friend called it a miracle.

My son was conceived.

I had grappled with and come to terms with not being a mother. I had tried to conceive and a specialist said don't risk it, in fact, get your tubes tied. The pregnancy did not happen on the night of the Birdy visit -- that would have been, well, rude. But it happened right after the visit from the lady of the hair.

We were thrilled. But I was stunned. My doctor immediately sent me to a high-risk practice. The pregnancy was easy, except for four months of nausea, which was not the scary kind that puts a woman in the hospital. Mine required me to eat constantly. I know. Go figure.

I sailed through delivery. The obstetrician was ecstatic. "You were a champ! Let's have one more, maybe two! Come on, this was easy for you."

Hold up. Fate had been tempted once. And there was only one visit from the lady of the hair. And that resulted in what one friend called "the miracle baby," who was born right before Christmas, even. If you can stand it.

One more thing. After Birdy died, the large family gathered in Pennsylvania from all over the country for a good old Irish wake. At the graveside service, our friend D.'s girlfriend F. was speaking. She had gotten along beautifully with Birdy. They were sympatico.

Soon after, a bird flew into the circle and started to tease F. Divebombing, in a way. Not threatening, playfully. The family laughed, the symbolism not lost on them. Birdy was there, saying hello to a favorite.

And what happened the following year was even more surprising.

D. married F. Well into his 40s, a longtime confirmed bachelor, this was beyond a shock. But they tied the knot and before long they were the parents of two children.

So this is the thing. The four of us, J. and I, D. and F., walked into a portal of sorts on that cold winter weekend in Pennsylvania. Birdy was on the verge of leaving this earth. The lady of the hair was somewhere in the ether, waiting to escort her daughter home. She showed herself to me, at least in a dream, seemed about to tell me something. At least in my narrative.

My son was conceived. Birdy died. Another life. And then, in such a short time, two more. Life and death.

Can you see it? Miracles, magic, coincidence, your call. We all die. We don't know when, how, what happens next. No details or specifics. Change is the certainty, that's the scary part. I think a big picture, though, is right in front of us, playing out everyday. A Birdy weekend happens maybe once in a lifetime, giving us clues on a marquee signboard.

I see it now when I spy a bird in flight, because it takes me back to that weekend. I don't know but feel we are unending, in some way. I remember that lesson. Circle of life.

Birdy's Lesson: She Was Not Alone

2009-07-12T16:38:00.000-07:00

My favorite uncle died last week. Truth be told, I was glad. Uncle M. was 96 and had stopped eating. In a nursing home, he didn't recognize his own daughter. When he did talk, it was to relatives long dead. Dementia had stolen his mind.

Yes, his passing gave him release from his earthly suffering. But my reasons go beyond his personal situation. Their roots are ancient, timeless, something I can't pinpoint precisely. But I'll give them shape with a narrative that revolves around a visit with an elderly woman named Birdy, some 16 years ago.

You could call this a ghost story. I call it a revelation. And it changed me to my very core.

The weekend began simply. After work on a Friday, J. and I drove out of the city into the hills of Pennsylvania. The constraining hours in the office, which had encircled us like coils of rope, faded with each mile. Our voices, strong with rich new breath, flowed freely. As we hurtled through the darkness, we grew bright inside the cocoon of the car.

Our friends waited for us beside a little store in a tiny town that had rolled up the sidewalks at twilight. They led us through winding lanes to D.'s grandmother's, a big old farmhouse. We had to drive the last miles slowly, watching for horse-drawn buggies caught out late, without lights. We were in other-worldly Lancaster County, home of many families adhering to Old Order Amish and Mennonite faiths.

D. introduced us to Birdy. He had talked about her with enthusiasm for so long and wanted us to meet her. "Before it's too late," he said. She was in her 90s, still living on her own in the big stone home of her birth, looked in on by neighbors, the parish, meals-on-wheels feeding her once a day.

She was delightful, just as D. had said. Charming, high lilting voice and laugh. I looked her straight in the eye, but also off to the side a bit, an old trick of mine that somehow allows me to imagine the young woman she had been -- sharp-featured, vibrant with energy.

Using her hands for emphasis, she directed her grandson and his girlfriend to get this and that from the kitchen and told J. to find something in a far corner.

Then she turned to me, lowered her voice to a whisper and said, "My mother has been calling me on the telephone. She calls alot. We have so much to talk about." She also told me something else. And I remember this quite distinctly. "My mother has been calling me. Because, you know, she's coming here soon."

She raised her voice again when the others drew near. She obviously did not want them to hear her talking about her mother, who had been dead for half a century. Those words were for me only. I was not surprised. People sense in me a sympathetic ear for lost causes, for what others know to be impossible.

The evening continued pleasantly, and several more times Birdy had the chance to whisper to me about her mother. She said she needed to stay close to the phone, that she was sleeping on the first floor because of the stairs. But also because she could get to the phone faster that way.

So, when we retired for the evening, J. and I went to the old master bedroom on the second floor. This had been Birdy's bedroom with her husband and the room belonging to her mother and father. It was the biggest bedroom in the sturdy house with walls a foot thick. Tired, we quickly fell asleep in the dark room.

But I woke up in the middle of the night. And I saw a small woman sitting at the foot of the bed. She had very thick, curly black hair flowing over her shoulders and down past the small of her back. She was small-boned, sharp-featured. Her frame was nearly overwhelmed by this thick mass of hair.

We watched each other for a few moments, I don't know how long. I sat up, with the idea she was about to tell me something. But J., a very light sleeper, startled awake, which scared me and I gasped. Or, I simply woke up from my dream. I'll never know. Because she was gone.

The next morning, I told D. what had happened, describing the apparition. He looked surprised. And started off through the house. He came back, finally, and said I had described, exactly, his great-grandmother, the former owner of the house. Birdy's mother. He was looking for a picture of her, to see whether I had seen it. And then conjured her up in a dream. Or something.

D. and his girlfriend were astounded. People always talked about this woman's hair. Thick, curly, black, masses of hair that nearly overwhelmed her small features. The woman at the foot of the bed in her old bedroom. And no, they had never talked about her around me and I'd never seen a picture. No one had a picture that I could have seen.

All of a sudden, my head began to pound. We were nearly through with breakfast and I just couldn't pretend I wasn't in pain. So J. gathered our belongings and made apologies, we thanked everyone and hustled out the door. I was really sick. I held my hands over my head and groaned as J. drove down the hills, alarmed.

Ten minutes later he pulled into a store parking lot to try to find something to help me. But the pounding stopped as soon as it started. The pain just lifted. I was fine. No explanation. We drove home and resumed our lives.

A couple of weeks later the call came.

Birdy had died.

She passed away quietly, at home, in that big old farmhouse in the Pennsylvania hills. She was pushing 100. She had not wanted to leave that home, ever, at least while living on this Earth. And she hadn't.

And I knew with absolute certainty that Birdy had not been alone at the end. Because she had told me so. Her mother had been calling her, on the telephone. And the mother was on her way, after all. And I'd seen her myself.

I don't know how to explain this kind of thing. I can't defend my idea that "we" simply do not end when it is time to leave this life as we know it, here and now.

I don't know how it happened or where they went, exactly. Or what they became. But the lady with the big hair came, when it was time, and took her daughter home. That much I know, in the very core of me.

Witnesses

2009-06-28T12:45:00.001-07:00

Jehovah's Witnesses materialized on our front porch one blazing hot summer day, while my mother was sick. I glimpsed them through the screen door, framed by a gravel road and cotton fields. Pamphlets in hand, God on their side, they inquired after my mother's salvation.

"Mother," I yelled toward her bedroom. "It's the Jehovah's Witnesses, asking if you're saved." After days of sickness, her voice came back suddenly strong, "Send them in."

The Witnesses had no inkling they were about to face an uncommon spiritual adversary.

My mother, pale and weak from the double assault of a migraine and back trouble, propped herself up on pillows. The two women and a man filed into the small room, standing respectfully at the foot of the formidable old oak bed that had belonged to my maternal grandmother. Pink began to seep into my mother's face. I peered around the edge of the doorway, wary but excited. The Witnesses were too confident. This was going to be good.

The visitors hurled the opening salvo, asking my mother whether she understood that their religion was the true way to salvation. My mother belongs to a Church of Christ in rural Alabama. There's an old joke about that church. The pope passes away and is welcomed at the Pearly Gates by Jesus. The pontiff asks what is the austere little white structure way off by itself. "Shhhh," says Jesus. "That's the Church of Christ. They think they're the only ones up here."

My mother countered the Witnesses' tactical mistake with biblical verses supporting her beliefs about the "one true church." That her church members do not follow any man's beliefs or accounts, but model their lives after Christ. And that the Bible is the only text for a Christian. Period.

Then the combatants locked horns over the Bible. Scripture verses flew in the room like racks of arrows. Some careening and crashing with an avalanche of noise, others falling in distant silence.

My mother felt disdain for the Witnesses' New World Translation, since they brought the matter up. She was civil. No amount of interpreting about contents and explanations about inserts could change that fact for her. When the Witnesses quoted one Bible verse, she quoted three. When they summarized an entire New Testament book, she brought up a raft of others, followed by words said to have come directly from Jesus himself.

My understanding of the arguments was hazy. I was a child caught up in the excitement of the encounter. I kept thinking of the words "when two or more are gathered together..." But this wasn't a worship session. This was an epic. My mother, ailing, warring against three in-perfect-health Witnesses looming over her bedside.

My mother had lived her beliefs, carefully studied the Bible, attended church every time the doors were open. Her scholarship was not casual. She had been on track to become valedictorian of her high school graduating class. Extremely shy, she was horrified of making the primary speech, so she purposefully messed up final tests so she could finish with the second highest grades. She should have gone to college, studied the math and science she excelled in, but there was no money. Her brothers paid for six months of secretarial college.

She worked for years for a man who was barely literate. But his correspondence showed no sign of this. Because it was written by her.

She put up with his condescension. And put her faith first in all things. With her intelligence, unshakable faith and refusal to be talked down to, in her own home no less, she did battle that day. I had been in houses of friends where Witnesses had stayed for hours, extracted promises of church attendance, contributions even. But they stayed no more than 15 minutes at my house.

That's because the Witnesses understood after a few minutes that they never had a chance. They put up a token fight. Then shaken to their doctrinal foundations, wished my mother well and quickly filed out the front door.

Rejuvenated, my mother rose from her sick bed, bathed and began tidying up, working in the kitchen. She hummed and sang old gospel hymns, her usual routine.

I'm not sure of it, but I can well imagine one of them. "Up from the grave he arose; with a mighty triumph o'er his foes..."

Fernet-Branca

2009-06-26T17:06:00.000-07:00

In Venice, they asked me to join them at their table. She ordered. Fernet-Branca. I had never heard of that Italian spirit. The waiter brought the liquid in a slender glass, thick, black with a tinge of green. A digestive, she said. I caught a whiff of pine.

She was tiny, ethereal, with exquisite clothes and wire-rimmed spectacles. Spiky black hair. He was not her physical counterpart -- gruff, ill-fitting suit on his bulky body. Earth bound. He could not take his eyes off her.

I asked about the Fernet-Branca. She warned me -- I wasn't likely to care for the taste.

Even though the spirit is made in Italy, it was not always available. So she carried a small bottle with her. At night after the conference meetings, she would pull the container from her bag and pour the thick liquid into a dainty glass at the hotel table, canal-side outside the hotel. Sip. Stare into the languid night of Venice, which had been cleared of tourists for the meetings. Her long brown cigarette glowing red near her cheek.

She filled me in on the Fernet-Branca. It was the only topic I heard her talk much about. The full list of ingredients supposedly has never been divulged. But some are known -- myrrh, chamomile, cardamon, aloe and saffron.

The drink was "all natural" because of the herbs and spices, she said. The spirit was developed as a health elixir, purported to be a tonic for all manner of illnesses back when.

As we sat, he continued to work. He chased delegation members after hours for extra stories, quotes, anything. It was the only way to do his particular job, he said. In between, he tried to check in with her, the delicate beauty he had seemed so unlikely to find.

He did not keep her.

One night, I heard later, he woke up deep in the night to find her in a compromising position with a man they had been keeping company with that evening. He threw her out. A scant few years later, he died suddenly, far too early, far from home.

She was wrong about me. Visiting Italy for the first time, engulfed in the magic of Venice, I loved the taste of Fernet-Branca.

I'm not much of a drinker now. Wedding toasts, maybe, a taste on New Year's Eve if the champagne is really good. But I do keep a bottle of Fernet-Branca, in the back of a tiny cabinet.

Once in a great while, the mood strikes. I pull out the bottle. I pour a small amount into a tiny crystal liquer glass, the only one left unbroken from my first marriage. I take it to the porch and sit. And like her, I stare into the night. I pull the scent of pine into my nostrils. Sip. And I remember.

Rattling the Chains

2009-06-25T09:40:00.001-07:00

There is a saying that southerners do not hide the eccentric or mentally ill when visitors arrive. They bring them down to the parlor and show them off.

My mother's attitude was even more nonchalant. She did not acknowledge mental issues unless they, say, reached murderous proportions. I suppose. I say that because at one point my sister and I had a daycare provider who periodically would need to leave to spend time at the state's mental institution.

I can't imagine that kind of thing happening in today's overprotective, litigious society. And the truth is, not only did my sister and I emerge unscathed. Our lives were richer for the experience.

D. was from "up North." Her family built a house not far from us in that stretch of former cotton fields that converted into a close-knit neighborhood during the nation's mid-century space race. They were really from Indiana, but native children didn't understand fine geographical distinctions.

My sister and I were thrilled to hear that the new people had girls our age. We waited for the workmen to leave and slipped into the shell of a home and poked around. I remember sweeping up debris, tidying bedroom spaces, imagining our new friends. Once a station wagon pulled into the unpoured driveway and I had to jump out of the stepless back of the home and hide in the sagebrush.

The new family pretended they hadn't seen a little girl running from the house. They talked about how pin neat it was inside, how the construction workers were the cleanest they'd ever encountered, all the sweeping up they'd being doing after themselves every day. And what do you know, they'd even left a little bouquet of goldenrod in a Coke bottle. All said in loud voices addressed to the golden sage in the back of the house where I hid, red-faced.

After the family moved in, my mother went back to work and my mother hired D. to watch my sister and me after school and during the summer. My sister and I, with D's four girls, became the gang of six. They taught us how to skate on the pond behind their house on the few winter days the water was frozen enough to hold our weight. We showed them blackberries and plums in the wild, just waiting to be gathered in big vats.

We played Batman and Robin, Flash Gordon, Witch games. Swam in small plastic pools and endlessly waited for turns on the Slip and Slide. My sister and I were thrilled to get to eat things my mother never served, like hot dogs and canned soup, washed down with green Kool Aid. Then, D. would send us to the country store to buy snacks. She had fallen in love with eating Goo Goo Clusters in between chain-smoking while watching her soap operas, cooled by a round squat fan I'd never seen before, called a hassock.

By summer's end, all of us, the six girls, were nut brown.

D. was always a yell-y fidgety type from the get-go, although harmless, she was the background noise. But she started gathering us in a circle to recite the previous night or weekend's drama. Bad things had started to happen. Her husband was working nights. And now "someone" was showing up outside the bedroom window. In the darkest part of the night.

She thought neighborhood boys were responsible at first, looking for mischief. She would yell, shine flashlights, go outside and demand they show themselves. But they never did. Because eventually she realized something much more sinister was actually appearing at night.

We sat cross-legged, eyes huge, mouths round. Waiting. Six girls, most of us not yet in puberty.

The thing, whatever, whoever it was, had started rattling huge chains outside the window, she said, the type used on boats. All night long. Hunched low into her soft chair, chain-smoking, she had stopped eating except for the Goo Goos. Her eyes were dark, darting. She couldn't stop talking about this horrible menace that parked itself outside her bedroom every single night and rattled chains through the dark hours.

Before long, she had gone. She was several hours away in the state's huge mental institution, for a bit of a rest, we were told.

When she came back, she was cheerful, happy, and her oldest daughter had taken over the household responsibilities. The girls were very careful of their mother, quick to defend against any perceived criticism or slight.

I was young, ignorant, insufferably curious. I actually asked her whether it was true that patients at the institution howled at the moon as another kid had told me while she was gone.

Her children recoiled in horror. But D. laughed. She was happy to clear up this misconception. Once again, we gathered around her in a circle and she talked about her days at the hospital. The routines, the doctors, the therapy, the other patients. The rest she got. That's all she needed. She was tired and just needed some rest.

And that was that.

Soon after, I started writing short stories whenever I had school assignments I didn't particularly want to do. Building forts with popsicle sticks was a particularly onerous task to me. So I would conjure a wagonload of pioneers heading West during a particular period and write about it instead, which always secured an "A" for me.

Other times, I would write about gothic themes. Something dire was usually waiting for the unlucky narrators, a thing so horrible that it could not be named. Although I'm told he no longer tortures the elderly D., this thing, this ghostly figure carries huge chains he rattles outside bedroom windows. In one form or another, it is D's "unspeakable horror."

The figure's ability to terrify is largely sheathed now. But he is lodged in an imagination that comes alive when I most need it -- vibrant, powerful, in technicolor. The colors of a young life that in some important ways was lived fully, without fear, and without censure.

A Love Letter to Grandfathers

2009-06-19T06:22:00.000-07:00

"I never met my grandfather
I wish I had
Sometimes I think he is watching me."

My son wrote that poem at age 6. His teacher, a veteran instructor who was never one to gush, had tears in her eyes when she handed it to me. He was writing about my father that day, but it could have been about his other grandfather too.

I understood the sentiment. The poem was an emblem of one of the bonds my husband, son and I share. We never met our grandfathers. They all had passed on when we were born.

In fact, my husband touched me more than I could express when we heard some people giving lofty speeches about the historic figures in the past they would like to sit down with given the opportunity. Lincoln, Jefferson, Lee and Grant, Freud, philosophers and poets.

My husband said he wouldn't have to think about that question. He would ask for a few minutes with one grandfather. He wouldn't be picky, someone else could choose which one.

So with Father's Day advertisements plastered all over the airwaves and elsewhere, we feel blessed to have known our fathers, certainly. And our mothers are powering along in the 90s category.

But we also think about those grandfathers we didn't get to know, wonder about the exact shade of the blue in their eyes, who had the curly hair I was born with, and a laugh that takes hold of the body unexpected, shaking us to the core, like mine does and my son's. What were their voices like? Did one of my husband's grandfathers have that deep voice? Did my son's grandfather have the off-the-wall sense of humor I've never found in anyone but my husband?

And the truth is, when you complain about the old geezers and maybe neglect them a little, we envy you. We are the ones who laugh at their corny old jokes in the grocery store lines and don't mind when they take too long to conduct their transactions.

If you feel they are too much, maybe, if you have something else you would rather do on this Father's Day, then send them to us. We'll be waiting, with a nice cake, a glass of cheer, open hearts, and all the time in the world, to just listen.

A Moveable Tea

2009-06-11T07:18:00.000-07:00

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly into the past." Nick Carraway, The Great Gatsby

If you see me carrying my "moveable tea," be aware I'm not alone. You probably won't see them, but I will be accompanied by two ghostly figures from my past, a genteel couple from the Deep South -- Ellis and Vannie.

They are the embodiment of the fact that even our smallest actions are informed by the past.

I was reminded of this the other night when I brought tea to a parent meeting. The mother of my son's friend said she was impressed, that I had thought of every little detail related to serving tea, hot and cold. And she was right.

I brewed organic darjeeling tea leaves with spring water and placed it in carafes, rinsed out with hot water, to seal in the heat. Even though I like my tea plain (why gild the lily?) I sliced lemon, poured milk into a small container, fine sugar into another. I resisted the urge to make sugar syrup, I would save this particular piece de resistance for another time. Spoons.

But the iced tea I made with tea bags, Lipton, it just tastes better cold. Spring water, again, heated slowly in the sun in a glass jar for a smooth taste. Ice. Tongs. Glass ice bucket. All carefully placed in appropriate insulated bags for the trip. That night I did not include finger sandwiches, tea bread and sweets because that wasn't my assignment. But all go into the "moveable tea" when appropriate.

"You really know how to do this," said the mother.

Yes, I do.

Years ago, when I arrived in Washington, D.C. from Alabama, I was quite unexpectedly bereft. I had spent years plotting my escape to the bright lights, big city. And I'd gotten my wish. But I missed my childhood friends -- especially the best and most honest person I know, J., who I had known since we were 5. Who happily played loving Mary to my feisty Laura (Little House on the Prairie) for untold hours out by the woods that cradled both our homes.

And why had I moved so far from my college familiar K., who could turn a dry cleaners trip into a high adventure. Why did I think I could leave behind our rowdy mountain compound horseback rides, followed by the rejuvenating communion of a silent row on the pond. The precious company of my little sister and her husband, who I had known since he was a bashful little boy. So many things I had casually tossed aside.

And then I found Ellis and Vannie. Or they found me.

Straight out of a storybook, this warm, beautiful couple from Montgomery, AL, famous for their southern hospitality, lived near me in a big beautiful corner rowhouse on Capitol Hill. Their yard burst with flowers and greenery tended by Ellis, a political operative who became a successful self-taught artist in his later years. They entertained regularly. Everyone was invited. They especially loved other southerners.

They told stories about their rich past. They had a clothing shop in Montgomery where Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald came everyday while recovering from a nervous breakdown in her hometown. Each day, she came in and bought just one snow-white linen handkerchief. Nothing more. Vannie would get a rare sad look on her face, "You know, Scott just ruined that girl."

And Hank Williams. Ellis had known the country music legend as a poor boy, shining shoes for pennies on the street. Then as a famous singer, he had to come into Ellis' shop one day and cut off his spendy wife's accounts. Embarrassed, he paid off what she owed and then said, "We're not married anymore. That's it."

I had no idea how many things I would learn from this couple. I'm still learning from them. Ellis was a chameleon. He had several careers due to a voracious appetite for life. He was quiet because he loved to listen to others talk. But he had a wonderful quality that I couldn't define until Vannie took me aside one day and explained it, laughing as always, her long straight blonde hair swinging around her shoulders.

"Ellis has a twinkle, you know," she said in her inimitable deep, slow drawl. A twinkle is a look in a person's eye that signals a playful personality, someone who is so curious about life and people that he or she finds it impossible to judge annoying personality quirks that can be so off-putting for many. You can see it right away. The physical aspect is a sparkle, a little glow, a glimmer, if you will.

Under their tutelage, I learned to look for and find the twinkle, which comes in people of all sizes, shapes, ages and colors. I never know when one will appear. When it does, it makes my day.

Over the years, Ellis and Vannie got old. The entertaining stopped. They couldn't go out. So I came up with the idea of the moveable tea. Via trial and error, I baked this and that and stored things and carried them over and kept at it until I managed to make it work.

They were honored. They were tired and sick. But for the short time that they were able to attend the moveable tea invented in their honor, the twinkle was back. And it extended to everyone in the room. This happened several times before before they passed away, a mere weeks apart.

So when the calls go out for volunteers to do this and that, I raise my hand and suggest various versions of the moveable tea. With practiced hands, I pull it together, wheel it in and start setting up.

And as that happens, a grand, beautiful blonde is holding up a long elegant hand with an emerald ring on one finger, the one reflecting the color of her eyes. She is laughing and pointing out the young woman who looks just like Zelda, before Scott "ruined" her. And Ellis is staring at a vase of flowers tumbling from a vase, possibly to paint later. And I see the vase is beside a quiet man surveying the room, eyes catching the light with a certain familiar sparkle.

And for no reason that anyone present can see, I am laughing too, with my old friends in a great room filled to the brim with paintings, flowers and old school southern charm. They are gone, that grand couple, but I carry them with me still.

An Exotic Trip

2009-06-06T17:48:00.000-07:00

One day, the older brother I worshipped suggested I go outside and dig a hole to China. So I gave it my best shot.

I believed him. I always believed him. So I got a shovel, dragged it to the lower lot next to our house and started to dig. I wanted it to be true. To go somewhere, especially an exotic place, one with cute outfits if my paperdolls from around the world were accurate representations. To be anywhere but that farming village in the deep South where I grew up.

My brother came out of the house, which had only recently stood in the middle of cotton fields. He watched me dig. He was straight-faced, confirming again that yes, I could dig my way to China if I continued to spade shovels of dirt long enough. It kept me out of his hair, gave him a reprieve from my incessant tattling, which I had started in retaliation because he had ditched me for friends of his own age and gender.

I remember being thrilled, working feverishly, yelling to anyone who happened by on the dirt and gravel road out front, "Hey, I'm digging my way to China! My brother told me all about it!"

Some of his friends eventually rolled up on bicycles, languidly twirling long green stems of grass from their teeth and lips, practicing for the cigarettes they would soon be trying out if not already. They smirked while giving me tips, then chipped in with digging help.

Eventually, my father came out, drawn by the growing commotion on his land. I remember informing him of my mission, that M. had divulged the secret to me. The hole was fairly deep at that point, only my shoulders and head were above ground. I can see him starting to laugh, his hands resting on his squared hips, legs wide, the confident stance of a man who had been an athlete and a soldier.

But he didn't dash the dream, squelch the effort, the fire in my eyes, arms and belly.

Instead, he enjoyed himself. He stood and chatted as the audience slowly grew for this peculiar mission -- a little girl of no more than nine, propelled by an older brother's mischief.

He supervised the site for safety, guarding against impromptu cave-ins and my younger sister's attempts to charge the hole. As the soft night stole over us, fireflies glowed against the ever darkening woods nearby. And still I kept on with my trance-like digging. My father's deep voice boomed, giving meandering lectures on the history of China and its leaders, communism, his dislike of all Chinese food (not that he'd ever tasted any).

Eventually, I gave up for the night, exhausted, covered head to toe in north Alabama's tenacious red clay, adding to my impossible laundry load carried by my mother, who understood my impulses. After all, she was still a tomboy too. And I went back to the hole the next day.

I don't remember how long I kept it up. But the digging went on for some time, definitely over a week. And then the rain started. It rained, poured, storms pounded the earth. I remember standing at the kitchen window, in despair, watching my China route fill with water. I couldn't see, but I knew. With that kind of biblical deluge, everything was filling up.

My brother, the heartless one who had started it all, joked that I would need to save my allowance for a submarine to make it to China.

The rain finally ended. I trudged through the mud to the hole. My father had built a wooden cover for it by then, to save animals and small children from falling in.

I pulled off the hatch. The hole was filled with muddy brown water. Literally full.

I was distraught.

The next thing I knew, a fake Indian war cry tore through the air, along with the metallic shriek of bicycle brakes. Jackie Ray! The neighborhood hoodlum boy, a bit younger than me, but a hurricane force of a boy. He had been desperate to get involved with the dig and I had absolutely refused. The dig was far too serious for the likes of Jackie Ray. He would have ruined the whole thing.

As I stood, frozen, Jackie Ray threw down his bike, tore off his shirt and jumped feet first with a huge splash and another war whoop into the hole to China. Which at that point was a big mud hole. Full of muddy brown water.

Filled with righteous fury, I yelled, demanded, "YOU GET YOURSELF OUT OF THAT HOLE RIGHT NOW JACKIE RAY!" He was completely oblivious. Jackie Ray, who was pretty much an abandoned little boy living with reluctant elderly relatives down in the woods, was having the time of his life. I stormed off. And met my father coming toward the hole to China. With a camera.

He was laughing so hard he could barely take the picture. But he managed. And that is what remains today of the hole to China, decades later. A faded photograph of a beaming stocky boy with a crewcut, in a mudhole. Smiling ear to ear. Laughing, full of joy.

As was the man behind the camera taking the picture.

Soon, I forgot about the whole thing. Eventually my father pushed the pile of dirt back in and we used it for a while as a barbecue pitt. But we abandoned that too. The China staging ground was later taken over by my father's excellent strawberry patch.

In time, I grew up, left home and traveled plenty. But my lifelong secret is this: I'm not sure, frankly, that my touring excitement ever quite matched the night I set out on my China dig.

All that's left of my great adventure is the picture of Jackie Ray swimming around in the hole. My mother won't let me have it, the photograph is too precious to her, to me, to all of us.

It was a silly thing, of course. But we were all there that night, fully present, vibrantly alive, engaged and happy. For a short time, we had the best of all worlds -- swept up in a child's excitement about traveling to an unknown, exotic land, while safely, thrillingly nestled in the unmatched glory of a southern summer night.

The Gift

2009-06-02T09:53:00.000-07:00

When it was all over, this blast from the past, K. was put out. She wanted a do-over, or an un-do-over in this particular circumstance. It would have been better if he had never come back into her life, ruffled her feathers, caused a stir.

The trigger in this case was a movie, "Lord of the Rings." He said he was watching the movie with his girlfriend and thought of K. and her clique, a bunch of hobbit crazy 18-year-olds. But it was K. he couldn't stop thinking about. So he called her parents' number. And as fate would have it, 30 years later, she was there that day, helping her elderly parents.

He never expected to actually talk to her. He just called to see whether someone answered. To ask how she was, to see whether she was still married, truth be told.

This call set off a series of e-mails, phone calls, small gifts of books and music CD's. He admitted he had never gotten over K. She was reluctant. She was long married, with children. He was a parent too, but long separated. Their parting had not been a happy one.

Their courtship way back then was brief, but intense. He was a dashing senior, about to graduate. She was a freshman. Flighty, beautiful, pursued by many. They were together as much as possible, and talked on the phone when they weren't. But he omitted one pertinent fact. He was engaged to be married to his hometown girl.

She found out one weekend when a friend still in high school called. The engagement had been announced in the newspaper.

K. was devastated. In the way of an 18-year-old girl who thinks she's in love for the first time.

She saw him one more time. He showed up outside her house that summer, late at night. He begged her to tell him not to marry. She refused. She wanted him to make that decision on his own. Pride. She wondered about that refusal for many years.

Until that day at her parents' house, when he called. Out of the blue. Warning sign. Not particularly contrite, even then. Ready to pick up and be friends. All those years later.

After some hesitation, K. got back on the roller coaster. Emotionally speaking. They did not see each other except for a very brief visit, once. Their affair was not physical. But it turned her life upset down.

He followed the same pattern he had as a younger man. He reeled her in with intense professions of feeling. Flooded her e-mail and voicemails with conversations and flattery. Proof, he said, of how much alike they were, of their suitability. He intimated they were fated for each other. He stopped seeing the girlfriend.

Heady stuff for a long settled middle-age woman with children who were grown and gone or just on the verge.

And then, when he had his quarry right where he had hoped, he bolted. Back to his solitude. She was hurt. Then finally relieved, set it aside. After a long silence, he surfaced but she ignored tentative attempts to communicate.

She knows now he is a hermit, really. It's not even his fault, I reminded her. A tiger doesn't change his stripes, even when he wants to. It is what it is.

I don't think K. would have actually left her life, when it got down to it. Her husband is distracted and not particularly attentive too often. But he's her family now. I think this interloper was a lesson, a last gasp, emotional fling that came along to teach her that. And for another reason she doesn't even understand. Yet.

This blast from the past wasn't really a waste of K.'s emotional capital. Because that former dashing romantic gave her a gift. He brought back a part of her that she left behind on the campus quad, that big beautiful expanse of green that went on and on, the one we thought we would walk across forever and ever.

Most of us lost a lot of ourselves from those days, during the long, hard trudges through work, parenthood, illness and losing people we loved. Through the ravages of time. K. was one of those people. Tired, going through the motions. But she's not now. Old Mr. romance is gone, he absconded again, but he left K. a present.

Her sparkle is back. Always beautiful, her blue eyes are not the only things about her that are alive with light. Yes, she is burnished by time and experience. Now she looks like she has a secret and she does. She knows from B.S. now. And she's turning heads again. It is a joy to be with her. Because she is absolutely aglow.

A Boy's Long Strange Path Here

2009-05-24T16:06:00.000-07:00

Motherhood never seemed real to me, a "maybe, someday" thing. A doctor said it wouldn't be a good idea, given my history. My first husband and I were married to our work anyway. The separations started early. But we couldn't manage the gumption to end it. Until finally we did.

Even during those bad years, D. was knocking on the door. Brushing against glass with bird's wings.

Once, I was in Georgetown with a gaggle of girlfriends having lunch. Wine flowed. We walked by a sign -- "Palms Read." Let's go in, I said. My friends pushed me into the closet-sized room first. I sat in front of a flimsy curtain while the woman of mystery read my palm. My friends peeked through the gaudy cloth and giggled.

The reader squinted at my palm, frowned, stared me squarely in the eye. I squirmed. What had one of my body parts done NOW? She stated that I was married to the wrong man. She asked whether I had children. Well, no. Obviously a mistake, she said. I would be a mother once I got rid of the wrong husband and married the right one. It was all right there in my palm. Mr. Right was already in my life, I knew him. No, no name available. But, said the mystery one, she could see a very vivid shade of blue all over my psychic profile. This blue was very important. Look for the blue. With that the reading was over, $25 please, and she went back to looking bored.

I was annoyed. What kind of fortune was that?

The session had been a lark. But still, it bothered me. I began staring too long at blue-eyed men of my acquaintance. Especially one co-worker, a man I liked, yet butted heads with fairly often. He reminded me of my father, the dark hair and blue eyes of black Irish ancestors. They shared the bull-headed disposition, but this man lacking the ameliorating southern charm.

But I kept thinking about the circumstances that led me to this workplace. Something had drawn me there.

I had applied several times. It wasn't a good fit, but the place had turned into a pest. I was called in for an interview when a new sheriff came to town because my name kept coming up over there. I felt I should give it a serious look. I interviewed once, then was called back for a second.

The session wasn't going well. Then the strangest thing happened. This boss man was winding up the chat, dismissing me, saying he was interviewing other candidates blah blah blah. I was already rising from my chair to make my escape. Relieved. Then I saw his face register alarm as he looked toward the huge glass window that made up one long magnificent wall of his office.

At the window was a very large dark bird, scraping and scrabbling against the glass as though trying to fly through it. Frantic, flapping, moving away only to crash back into the glass. We froze, the boss and I, unable to move. I caught my breath. The boss appeared to be in genuine pain about this bird's plight.

Suddenly, the creature got its bearings and flew away in a burst. We exhaled, the breaths audible in the still room. Then, the boss blurted a job offer, at a salary I could not refuse. He told me to go home and "prayfully consider" the request, terms I was not used to from crusty news bureau bosses. And to call him after the weekend. I thanked him and walked, stunned and shaky, down the long hall, out of the office and finally the building. I stared into the sky, thinking "WHAT WAS THAT????!!!!"

I took the job. Something unfathomable was at work. And I could not resist its pull.

Then came the first Gulf War. As Iraqi tanks stole into Kuwait under the cover of darkness, my first marriage imploded, this time for good. Sitting in the marriage counselor's office, after two years of circuitous talk that no longer covered up our relationship's torturous death, I said I just could not do it anymore. He stood, picked up his briefcase and walked out. Eleven years of marriage, 14 years together. Homes bought and sold, journalism careers pursued together, moves. An entire life rose from the therapist's chair and walked out the door.

The next weeks were a haze. Drums sounded around the clock from anti-war protestors sitting vigil outside the White House near my office. I moved into an apartment across from the soaring Washington Cathedral. Because my life was not gothic enough, a bat slipped into my nearly empty apartment and hid out during the daytime, coming out at night to flap about and terrorize me. Finally the elderly resident manager found it for me, threw it out the window, flapping back home toward the cathedral.

But none of this was nearly as strange as what I found out a year or so after the death of that marriage. During a long talk with another man, J., who worked in my office, I was surprised to find that his engagement had ended on the day of the Iraqi tanks, the same afternoon, in fact, that my marriage fractured a final time.

J. and I had not been friendly enough at that time to know that about each other. It had only come out during the intimacy of dating, which began six months after my marriage ended.

This sweet man from Iowa, the youngest of five, who I had thought of as a little brother because I was so comfortable with him. Who made me laugh. Who still makes me laugh the loudest and the longest, all the time, especially when he doesn't try.

There was a vivid clue but I didn't see for a long time.

After I accepted the new job, the boss asked me to come over during my lunch hour for a banquet with some newsmaker or another. I was still working out my notice at the old place. I said okay. I walked over and got into the elevator of the building where the odd bird had been flapping its wings against the glass just days before.

The elevator doors opened. And there he was, J., standing there as though he had been waiting for me. I didn't know him from Adam. But he stood there tall, friendly, welcoming and, well, cute. He started talking. It made no real sense but I understood him perfectly. Something about having washed his hands but the towel dispenser was empty. He was funny and warm and I relaxed immediately. I felt like I had known him forever.

J. welcomed me to my new workplace. He's so nice, I thought. And I couldn't help noticing his eyes. Like a certain mystery woman clad in veils behind a curtain predicted, the man I married a few years later and improbably had a son with was standing there staring at me with eyes a wonderful, vivid, shining shade of blue.

It just took a while for it all to fall into place. And even longer for me to see. A bird desperately hurling itself against the glass of a workplace where I didn't even want to be but felt helpless to resist. War and bats and sad endings, culminating in the beautiful, vibrantly healthy, yelling boy who was so easily born without incident and took away the breaths of every single person in the hospital delivery room.

But I was the most amazed of all, a 40-year-old first-time mother who wasn't even supposed to give birth. I held him, staring, and could not stop saying, "I can't believe it. I just can't believe it."

The baby was so strong, he nearly hurled himself off the warming tray, alarming the veteran delivery nurse. "They're not supposed to be able to do that," she said, white-faced. I understand that now, nearly 16 years later. This boy had to wait a while to arrive, for an unlikely mother to open the door. By the time that happened, he was already an old soul. He had been on one very long, strange path.

The Fox Hunt

2009-05-16T15:12:00.000-07:00

I shadowed my father on a few hunting and fishing trips as a kid. He also let me tag along "to the store" -- an excuse to loaf with his buddies, sprawled on benches around a wood-burning stove, sneaking smokes, talking about nothing.

But my begging never penetrated the iron wall of his resistance when it came to fox hunting. No. Never, not even one time. These forays, with his older brother and men they had known for most of their lives, are still burnished with mystery and ritual, decades later.

This was not riding to hounds, with horses and tea tables laid out under a stand of trees. The hunts led by my uncle were far more primitive. Still, rules governed them. And first and foremost, this was a masculine enterprise.

On hunt day, the hounds knew. I imagine they woke up, lofted those fabled noses into the sunlight and smelled what awaited them -- a long sweet chase through the unparalleled beauty of a middle Tennessee night.

Uncle H., a tough old bird forced to leave school and take over a man's roles at the age of 8 when his father died suddenly, trained his dogs with a firm yet loving hand. Once, a lunatic neighbor shot sweet Lucy for running across his property. It hurt her so severely she had to be put down. It nearly killed my uncle.

For these men, the hunt was all about the hounds. We drove up from Alabama, so the dogs heard our car coming first. My father descended the long familiar dirt and gravel road on my uncle's farm, following the smooth limestone-bed creek running parallel to the pasture. Hearing the car, the dogs yipped and howled first in warning, then in greeting after recognizing us from a distance.

I always made a beeline for the barns, which were filled with hay bails and many cats. From my perch in the top, I watched men converge as the afternoon light began dissolving into the treetops past the white farmhouse, making its way to the river and beyond. Men in overalls or jeans and hunting jackets climbed from cars and battered trucks. Some shouldered rifles and shotguns, others clutched flashlights and lanterns.

Every single time, I would ask my father to bring me the fox tail from the hunt. I had visions of fashioning a hat with a fox tail for myself. Or a stole. I'm not really sure. My father would say yes, of course. I made him promise. I badgered, confirmed it with Uncle H.

But at a certain point, they were beyond listening to my prattle. The men were animated, the dogs pacing, pulling, straining on leashes -- anxious to run.

Finally, a sharp whistle cracked through the murmurs and the roar of the barking. The men took off, barely able to hold the leashes of frantic, pulling dogs desperate to be on the run. The men and dogs swelled in the yard, around the smokehouse, spooking work mules and horses behind the house. A swarm now, they flowed finally through the gates of the south pasture along the creek, the one with the sweet cold water waiting to be cupped into dried gourd dippers hanging from nails on the well house. And then, with twilight settling into the hills, they were gone.

I tried to wait up, fighting sleep. I asked again why only men and boys could go. "Some of those men talk rough," my aunt would say, a quaint notion now. So I strained to hear the dogs in the distance. And I could, once they picked up the scent of a fox running a circuit in the night, looking for food.

That sound was a high-pitched howling that the men called fox-hound music. I knew the men were gathered around a fire, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, talking, listening with a faraway look in their eyes. Their minds were on the competition taking place at a distance. The dark, barbed wire fences, steep hills and gullies made following the hunt treacherous. But following wasn't the point. The point was the chase. The men were discerning the sounds from the dogs. They translated for each other, especially for the younger men and boys in their gathering.

They knew which dog was closing in on a fox. They knew who was bringing up the rear, or had lost interest. They knew how close the dogs were, whether the fox was outrunning or outsmarting the dogs. They could tell by the way the dogs "cried" that they had lost the scent. They talked about how much faster Lucy was this year, say, but that Sam was gaining on her. That the younger dogs would need seasoning. That maybe this was old Jack's last hunt.

They could tell by the music they were hearing -- the dog's singing voices. The howls, cries, barks, how long and how high the pitch. These things wove the tale in the mind's eye, painting a canvas of vibrant color and motion to go along with the sound.

They had an idea when the fox ran through a herd of cattle to throw off the trail. Or ran to ground. If the dogs found another fox to chase. And if a fox was cornered or trapped, the men whistled and called the hounds off, fired a gun in the air. These men who could seem so hard, so impervious to death on the farm, wanted the fox to go free. If the fox population had been leaving the farmers' livestock alone, that is. If the wild creature being chased that night was really a fox instead of a coyote that had been killing calves and pets.

There was no need for senseless killing. Or for taking a bloodied fox tail to a little girl who wasn't a hunter or fisher in any form or fashion, whose father amended those trips when she wanted to go, making them into nature strolls, really. Because that girl grieved for days when she found dead minnows in her father's fishing bait pail.

These were men who simply wanted to give free rein to the hounds. Letting them do what they were born to do -- catch the scent of a beautiful, clever, wild creature and track it, sing the fox-hound music. They were men reveling in the freedom and beauty of a deep dark night in the southern wilderness. In the easeful company of other men, they celebrated life. Blessed life.

The Non-Goodbye

2009-05-02T17:32:00.000-07:00

--"I can scarcely bid you good bye even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow."
*John Keats

I guess I'm not done. I'm still thinking about my father here.

Some odd things happened right after he died. The death was sudden, an accident, so we were in shock. I kept thinking the emotional blow was behind my strange reaction. Then later, I found out a friend whose parents passed away a year apart following long illnesses experienced similar things. And those deaths had been expected.

So, I wondered, what the heck.

I was with my mother for nearly a week after the accident. The house was chaos for a few days. People stopped by with enough food to feed a battalion. The phone never stopped ringing.

And as I live and breathe, I could hear him, my father. The deep voice that sang bass in the Methodist choir, led countless closing prayers, instructed an adult class in that church for decades. The voice that settled a one-room schoolhouse of overgrown farm boys who accepted his authority only after wrestling matches at recess (my father always won).

His voice was strong, his laugh infectious. And I could hear both ringing bell clear in the hours and days after he died. I was so certain of this that I would charge from the room I was in, searching for him. But he wasn't there. He was never there.

I also could hear his pickup truck pull into the driveway. I would rush to the window and look. But the truck was where it had long sat, ready for the tailgate to be pulled down and his pointers to leap in, eager for a ride deep into the countryside in search of a quarry of quail. It had not moved, no one had touched that truck.

After a couple of days, I thought I was losing my mind. I slept with the lights blazing. I would dose, exhausted, and my eyes would fly open thinking "he's here" -- and of course, he wasn't.

I thought it was because I had not been at the hospital when he died, had not said goodbye. Because my mind was not accepting the truth. Because I had not seen the awful results of that accident. That I was "hearing" him even after the freakish experience of seeing his name on the town's funeral home sign, where the long wake had to be extended because people kept arriving, hour after hour after hour.

Maybe it was because I kept rediscovering him? At that wake, friends poured in, former co-workers, people I had never seen. One neighbor stood alone and very still, with tears in her eyes. She said my father was kind to her family when they moved there. "Everyone else ignored us. He was the only one in the whole town who made us feel welcome here," she said. I had no idea.

We gave him a funeral the next day and had lunch at home with all that food, asking everyone at the service to please join us. Then I drove my mother almost four hours to his Tennessee hometown for yet another funeral and the burial on that blazing hot July day.

My siblings went back to Alabama. But my mother and I spent the night in the house where she was born, a remote place of no streetlights and river rock roads. I saw only pitch black darkness from the window. And the sounds were a profound comfort for me -- a nightlong mercy symphony from fields and woods filled with crickets, katydids and frogs.

Before leaving, my mother, an aunt and I stopped by the cemetery. I placed a dime by the temporary marker, a private hello. That's because my dad would distract me from childhood vaccinations by putting a coin in front of me at the exact moment the nurse pushed a needle into my arm.

I had been a trooper until then, channeling my father's best social self for long hours in public. Helping my mother with decisions I knew my dad would want.

But then my mother, standing dry-eyed by his freshly dug grave, put down a small flower arrangement and said softly, "Well, I brought you home." And she quickly walked away.

My heart cracked open.

I sat in the car and cried in silence for several minutes. We did not speak, the three of us, the new widow, her older sister and I. Then I started the car and drove through silent headstones and tombs, back to my aunt's house and then to Alabama. I continued to hear my father, although his voice was fading with each day.

I stayed in my hometown for two more days. My mother flies into high gear to cope. I need down time. Not sleeping, hours of driving, going on my mother's manic missions. These included returning flimsy pie pans meant to be thrown out, to the surprise of people who brought food in them specifically so we did not have to take them back. I was worn out.

My siblings live in the same town with my mother, so she had company and help. She wasn't bereft. She was energized, hyper, keeping herself busy. We were starting to grate on each other. So I left. At the airport when I got back, J. met me, folded me into his long arms and brought me home. I really slept for the first time in nearly a week.

I talked to my friend L. I told her I thought I was losing my mind, hearing my father and his truck pulling into the driveway. She said she heard similar things after losing both her parents, a year apart.

I was relieved, to say the least.

That's because L. doesn't believe in the woo woo. She is not given to fancy, belief in the supernatural, things not scientifically nailed down and the like. Once, after she had surgery, I drove her home from the hospital, installed her on a couch, and turned on a relaxation tape of flutes and babbling brook, birds singing, etc., thinking she would find it peaceful and, well, healing.

We were quiet for a bit. Then she said:

"C.?"

"Yes?"

"You are SO weird."

But this is what she said about "hearing" our relatives after they had passed away. Or something to this effect: "It was like there was a scrim or a curtain of gauze between this world and the next. And my parents had gone just beyond that curtain. And I felt like I could reach out and almost touch them, but not quite. And that they could touch me if they wanted to. But they didn't. And wouldn't. Because I didn't want them to."

She said the feeling lasted a few weeks. Then one day she realized the curtain was gone and so was the feeling that her parents were just there, behind it. She felt their souls had moved on, to where they were supposed to go. That this process just took a while, longer than we had been taught to believe.

And it was like that for me too. In time, I didn't hear my father.

Except for one last time.

A few months after he died, I had a dream about him.

In the dream, the telephone rang. My father was calling. He was dressed in his blue and white seersucker suit, his summer dress up outfit. In his hand, he held his white hat with the tiny pearl pin in the hatband.

I told him we had been extremely worried, looking for him everywhere. He was laughing, telling me not to fret. He chatted a bit, he was on a trip. Healthy and fine. The charming, gracious father, the one with his best foot forward, bad moods nowhere in evidence.

"I am fine. Everything is good. I am doing very well."

And that was that.

So, I was not with him when he passed away like his other children and my mother, even his friends at the restaurant, the ones he shook hands with on that last day. But during my last visit, we had gone to a movie together, as reader Rebekah said, a sort of special goodbye that he had suggested and completely out of character. Then he seemed to stick around for a while, for me. And he came to tell me goodbye again, in a dream.

But I hate goodbyes. I don't say them.

I will, instead, be leaving a dime in this spot and that when I think about my father. That's my decided response to this whole thing, once and for all. Finally.

The random dimes are me saying, "Well, hey there daddy."

I won't be saying any goodbyes.

Meant To Be

2009-04-26T19:13:00.000-07:00

I'm borrowing this story. Read on and you'll see why.

The setting was the rural deep south, a car winding along a dark road in the hollows of the Appalachian foothills. The driver was a young woman, Sarah, taking her relatives home after a trip to church. Her passengers were Eva, we'll call her, and Eva's son Charlie.

Eva was a widow. She'd been married to Irvine for 60 years when he passed quietly, the way he had lived. She was elderly, her health fading. This was cause for concern. And that concern would be Charlie.

Charlie, himself an old man then, had been born with disabilities. These were people who handled their own problems, for better or worse. Charlie had always lived at home, worked with his father on the farm. They were salt of the earth, sharecroppers. He went to school some, but mainly stayed close to home. People told Eva and Irvine to send him away. They refused. They taught him what they could, how to get by, with their help. Took him to church every time the doors opened. Still, he was dependent.

Now, with Irvine gone, and Eva fading more each day, relatives were increasingly worried. Proud people, working hard at their own jobs and raising families themselves, just getting by, they didn't know what they would do when, well, the worst happened. Charlie was an only child. Eva and Irvine had no siblings left. The family was small and resources were limited. Family members were doing all they could to help.

But Charlie had been nearly inconsolable when Irvine passed. He wouldn't make it when Eva died. It was all too much to even consider.

Sarah had taken Charlie and Eva to a church singing that evening. They were winding home along the hollows. Eva loved singings. Irvine used to take her, driving for miles in the ramshackle pickup. Sarah was happy to help, when she could. She loved the singings too.

The night was unseasonably chilly, but Sarah wasn't worried. She'd grown up in those gentle hills. Although she was not driving her usual route, still, this was her home turf. She had wanted to get them all home earlier, it's true, but her aunt had been in such a good mood, lingering to talk to some of the gospel singers, some in the audience too. People she'd not seen in a while, since Irvine's death two years before sent her into a sad slump.

Eva was happy tonight. So, because of that, Charlie was too. They left the church on a high note.

So they drove, listening to Eva hum old hymns, the car headlights fashioning a path of warm gold for them just ahead through the mists cascading heavily now over the night-blackened hills.

It happened in a blink of an eye.

Sarah didn't understand. They had been moving and now they were stone still. The rush of the wind outside the car was replaced by silence. And then a moan. Eva. She was calling Charlie's name.

Finally the horror surfaced, pulverizing the merciful numbing shock. The car was tilted, almost at a 90-degree angle. It had left the road somehow. They were alive, but hurt. At night, in the cold, in the middle of nowhere, in the days before cell phone nation.

Sarah felt hysteria rise in her throat, frantically fighting the urge scream. Was that gasoline she smelled? Could she get out of her seatbelt and get to Charlie in the back? He wasn't moving, speaking. Eva was still, too, but whimpering.

Suddenly, Charlie started to stir. Then twist and pull, trying to get out of his seatbelt. The car was pushed in and mangled, Sarah sensed any further movement could make the situation worse. She was panicking, yelling now, begging him to calm down. God help us, she cried us, over and over. God please help us.

And then it happened. Sarah heard a voice. Someone else was in the car. The soft, gentle, masculine voice of a man they all three had known and loved all their lives.

It was Irvine. He was in the car, with them.

The fear, shock and pain went away, replaced by calm and relief. The four sat throughout the long, cold night, waiting for the first rays of sun to break through the mountain tops and dense trees.

And finally another car came over the hill and around the curve where the black ice had melted. The ice that earlier had formed in silent treachery over the road surface, sending Sarah's vehicle careening off the blacktop, flipping several times before coming to rest against a tree. On the passenger side, where Eva had been sitting in the front seat. And Charlie behind her.

Rescue workers were summoned. Sarah was hospitalized briefly for observation, with minor injuries only. Eva and Charlie were gone by the time the sun came up. Their injuries were profound, doctors said a quick rescue response would not have saved them. And of course, no one else was found in the car.

At the funeral, Sarah was quiet, sad, but at peace. She had been assured there was nothing she could have done to prevent the accident and what followed. She had cared for her dearly loved aunt as best she could for years. It took several years for her to relay the story of the night in the car to the man who told it to me.

True to her character, Sarah was not effusive or emotional in her description of what followed the accident, the hours in the car.

She said she was beginning to panic and was praying out loud when she heard Irvine's voice. He actually spoke very little, which had always been his way. He talked to them quietly, about simple things, the things that mattered, the life they had spent together, their love for each other.

Irvine had come to comfort his family through the last hours of their life in a car that wrecked on a dark cold night. And then, as though it had always been meant to be, he took them home.

A man who had always claimed he was an atheist told this story to me. But with tears in his eyes and his voice breaking, he admitted he believed every word of it, despite the supernatural elements. Partly because he knew the principals, good country people not prone to fibbing or hyperbole. But mainly because, in the narrative that defied scientific rationalization, he recognized the clear, high struck sound of truth.

More Than A Movie

2009-04-18T14:25:00.000-07:00

On my last visit with my father, he wanted to see Kevin Costner's "Dances with Wolves." I was floored. My father was an action man, he considered movies a waste of time.

Plus, his eyesight was failing him. He had just turned 80, and although very strong physically, had senile macular degeneration. He could not see directly in front of him, only his peripheral vision worked. But he wanted to go to "Dances," something about the buffalo and wide open vistas of the West.

Another thing, he wanted to pick up my niece, L. What? This man who insisted that his children go to school unless we were practically in the hospital? But I complied, going to L.'s teacher and blurting out his request. I had grown up with this woman. She laughed and said "no problem." L. was thrilled. She got out of school before lunch to go to the movies!

So, my father took one arm and my 10-year-old niece the other as I made my way from the bright lobby into the dark, nearly deserted theater. I actually couldn't see, but shuffled to a row and settled them in on either side of me. One questioned me about this, the other about that, and I explained the scenes on the huge screen as best I could.

And I was mesmerized. I would never have gone to this film on my own initiative. I've never cared for Westerns. But there were many layers to this tale about inadvertent Union Army hero Lt. John Dunbar, whose assignment to a remote outpost in the wilderness of the Dakota territory changes him forever.

It was a wonderful afternoon. I had often roamed with my father as a child through woods and fields, on hunting trips, through small towns exploring. But this was the first time we had been to a movie together since I was a very small child and we saw "The Story of Moses" at the drive-in at my mother's request.

My visit home, from Washington, D.C., in May of 1991, also was noteworthy for something my father said. This man loved to talk, and would do so with or without a conscious audience. He drove me crazy asking what I thought about, say, South Africa sanctions before I'd had a chance to pour a cup of coffee in the morning. But he rarely discussed the personal. Feelings were taboo, or at least, not interesting to him.

But on that visit, out of the blue, he told me he regretted not enjoying his children more when we were growing up. That he had been too wrapped up in making a living and allowed precious moments to slip away.

Age had mellowed him a bit, but he was volatile when my siblings and I were growing up. He was raised on a farm and probably shouldn't have left that life. He wore a suit and worked behind a desk even though he craved the outdoors. He could be the happiest person in the room or the gloomiest, and we never understood what would set off his moods.

So, when he talked about regrets, again I was floored. For the second time that visit. Because this was the closest thing to an apology I'd ever heard from my father. I didn't realize at the time how significant it was, that comment, the movie, the entire visit.

Because soon my time at home was over, and I was on a plane back to my life. Quickly these things slipped from my thoughts. And then two months later, on a Saturday morning in July, 1991, I got the call from my little sister. The one that stops time. The one you never forget.

I sat with wet hair in a white terry cloth robe, on my bed, phone to my ear. I stared out over a mass of treetops, watching planes approach National Airport just over the river in Arlington, VA. Hundreds of miles to the south in my hometown, my father had been hit by a car. He had been crossing the road after his regular morning coffee session at the "liar's table" with his friends at their favorite restaurant.

It was bad. He'd been airlifted to the hospital. It didn't look good.

He died before I could get home.

There are imponderables, still, about that day. Why did my father stop in the median, appear to see the approaching car, but then run full speed into that vehicle? A friend, who shook hands with my father and watched him walk away, saw the accident. Then at his funeral, why did two people choose then to tell me they had seen him walking too close to the road several times? He was stubborn, chaining him down would have worked, maybe. But if we had known, we could have had a chance to intervene. Maybe.

And sometimes I wish I had gotten the chance to say goodbye. I was in the air when my mother, abiding by my father's wishes, made the decision to turn off the phalanx of medical equipment keeping him artificially alive. The internal injuries were massive, his brain was destroyed, there was no hope. My sister talked some about his last hours in the hospital, so maybe being spared those images was a gift. I've never talked about any of this with my mother. We don't discuss these things.

Maybe because of this, though, every year the month of April lurks in silent menace. When it arrives, I count off the days until the 20th, his birthday.

For years I had a recurring dream: I was falling from the top of a cliff, the fall seemed to go on forever, in terrifying detail. But just before I hit bottom, my father stepped out from nowhere and caught me. Safe.

I haven't had that dream in a very long time. I guess it's gone.

But on his birthday, I watch our movie. Seeing it brings back our last great adventure and gives me some idea about where my father has gone, at least in spirit. I see a strong, brave man on a horse heading off into vast unexplored territory. The vista is one of big sky, big land. He's just gone on ahead.

And then I cry myself to sleep.

Cotton Fields Back Home

2009-04-15T20:38:00.000-07:00

I read a blog the other day by a poster who was trying to meet new friends after a move. This involved finding common interests via the internet, then getting together in person.

The entry generated some sympathetic comments. I had nothing useful to add and did not post. But the subject sent my mind, and senses, into an irresistible bout of time-shifting. It was a cold, nasty day, after all. And I needed warmth. So I found it, in my mind, in north Alabama's rich red cotton fields. Goodness, how long ago. Half a century.

It was the late 1950s and we had moved to the Tennessee River Valley. My father built a house in the middle of a cotton field. And five days a week he put on a suit and a brimmed hat and commuted into the city to work, leaving my mother with three small children and no relatives or neighbors to speak of, at that point. We were in a tiny, very insular farming community where people had known each other all their lives.

Mother took us to church every time the doors were open. But it wasn't enough. She was lonely.

So she reached out in the only way she knew. Mother was raised on a tobacco farm and had never picked cotton. But she was no stranger to hard work. With her son in school, she got a sitter for her younger daughter, sewed a little sack for me from a netted grapefruit and attached a cloth strap. And off we went.

Cotton pickers for hire. No experience. In search of friends.

In Texas I'd left behind my best and only friend. I didn't understand what was happening when this little girl held onto our car door, her face inches from mine, sobbing. My mother insisted, "We're just going on vacation, we'll be back." She knew better than to set me off, her theatrical child.

She didn't buy it. This girl, a year or so older than me, was losing her near-constant companion and absolute servant. Her family owned a general store next door. Our long days of play were halted only by the welcome interruption of lunch at her place. In the store, at a small kitchen table behind the meat counter, we wolfed down excellent sandwiches. I especially remember the bologna and cheese, thick slabs of meat and dairy slapped together with mayo. Washed down with icy Dr. Pepper straight from the cold drink box.

All too soon, those days were over. My father was taking us to Alabama where he'd gotten a better job. It was closer to home for my parents, whose Middle Tennessee families had not understood the move to Texas, which then became the place where my sister and I were born. And that was enough, it was time to go home, or close enough.

On that last day, Mrs. H. took her time in pulling her grieving daughter away. She was upset too. Maybe she wanted my parents to own the sadness they had delivered with this move. And she probably did not approve of the fib my mother told. I remember smiling intensely, as we pulled away, waving hard, trying to get my friend to buck up.

I never saw her again.

Unlike in Texas, we had no neighbors in our new home, no general store next door. In the back, we had lush woods that I would grow to love, my refuge. And more woods across the road in front. Scary woods that gave shelter to howling coyotes and wildcats that made their way down from the small mountains ringing the entire vista.

And we had cotton fields, masses of stalks rising from fields like a vast stick army. They start out green, then flower and produce bolls. As the fiber matures, the plant dries out and the cotton bursts forth in soft pods of white puff that hold seeds. By the time we arrived in Alabama, machines had started harvesting some fields. But laborers still picked smaller fields and also combed the remnants left behind by machines.

The pay was minuscule for pulling the white fluff from rows with gloved hands and sending it tumbling through the holes of the bags strapped across our chests.

The work was grinding, hot, strength-sapping. Unless you were there on a mission, like my mother, or a lark like me.

Segregation was still in full force then. But in the cotton fields, the races easily worked side by side. Talk flowed, a necessary distraction from the tedium, the sweat. Oldtimers gave tips for preserving soft hands and keeping the sacks from tangling. Jokes were told. The occasional dirt clod flew after the school bus dropped off more pickers. Cotton field flirtations swelled and fell apart.

All were equal in the cotton field. At least for those few hours.

I was young, so my exhilaration soon ebbed. My mother would be on a roll, so her solution was simple. She let me crawl into the bottom of her sack.

The voices of my mother and her cohorts in the cotton soon lulled me to sleep. A bit of song here, a scrap of scripture, the soft scrape of the bag being pulled on the soil. Laughter rising, the sweet-smelling cotton floating down on top of me, bit by bit as I rode curled into a ball inside a bag being gently pulled down one row and then another.

At the end of the day, we hauled our sacks to a big truck to be hoisted onto a hook for weighing. The farmer announced the weights and fished out pay from an old cigar box. Everyone wanted the big haul. One perpetual winner was C.S., a teenage girl who could outpick any man on the field. I loved the days she showed up to pick. Her weigh-ins launched endless rounds of taunts, shouts and laughter.

But even the littlest picker got a chance to participate in my favorite part of the cotton harvest. Something I conjure up in detail when things in this life get a bit rougher than I would like.

Back then, the big kids demonstrated our end-of-picking celebration. I watched, then came my turn.

I climbed the slats to the very top of the truck side and dropped inside a few rungs, facing out. Next I carefully climbed back up, balancing on the top rail. When I got the signal that all was clear, I took a springing jump, like a backwards swan dive, although stopping short. My body stayed perfectly straight, arms flung out wide, legs rigid, toes pointed. I kept my eyes fastened tight to Alabama's big, blue sky.

And I fell back into the big, soft, warm mass of cotton that we had all just gathered. Fell and bounced and fluttered my arms and legs to burrow in deep. And to take in that scent.

Because the smell that covered me was something no manner of alchemy can ever get close to -- deep sweet softness melded with the sun, the sky, the rain and of course that rich red earth.

I tell people sometimes that I picked cotton as a child. And usually they recoil in surprise. But we dug into our new town in a way I doubt would have been possible if my mother had not taken the land's measure and decided to go to the cotton fields. We were truly of that place -- whatever it took, whatever came our way, we belonged.

And at the end, when my life is passing before my mind's eye as they say, I'm pretty sure I can predict at least one scene: I'll be climbing the wooden slats of a big truck filled with soft white cotton, breathing the sweet smell in deep, getting ready, pushing off hard, arms spread wide...

The Barn

2009-03-22T19:40:00.000-07:00

I spent a heart-wrenching New Year's Eve of the Millennium at my home only a few miles from the capital of the free world, Washington, D.C. But for reasons I couldn't have anticipated.

My husband was staying downtown, part of some emergency contingency planning in case the "worst" happened. An old friend, L., had come up from Alabama to, well, face the end with me and my 5-year-old in suburban Virginia. I'm being dramatic, but like many, we weren't sure what waited for us. We just wanted to pass the big milestone together.

My son was in a celebratory mood. L. bought him sparklers, party hats and balloons. So he decided we must be having a big party. We heard from neighbors that he was inviting them over to the big gala. "Come over at midnight," he cajoled. We had no such plans, takeout for three and TV being on the menu. And the little party planner, wound to hysteria by his prep, passed out on the sofa at 6 p.m., down for the night.

It was then, I got the first telephone call. But it wasn't from my husband, who was in or near "the bunker" or something concocted by people who get paid to think of these things. The call was from my mother, speaking urgently from my hometown. The news was dramatic, far more so than the anything I was hearing from my husband in D.C.

"Your brother-in-law was out burning some brush. It was windy and it got away from him. It's threatening the barn. I have to go back over there and see what's happening," was the gist of my mother's report. And then she was off.

Oh. My. God. Not the barn. That beautiful piece of art, really, behind my sister's big white columned house, the place she wanted her entire life, the one her friends call "Tara." And the barn was not just another picturesque rural structure in the countryside. Home to horses, beside a pond and a sweet rope swing, surrounded by towering oaks on all sides, it also housed a fully lit, regulation-size basketball court on the second floor, installed by the farmer who previously owned the place.

And on Y2's Eve, it was all threatened.

A second call came in about 20 minutes after the first. My mother again. "It's caught fire, the barn. Your sister is so upset. She's out there with him and they're fighting the fire the best they can, with hoses. It doesn't look good. I have to get back."

I was holding the phone to my chest, I remember. Picturing my mother, then a young-for-her-age 80, rushing down the back steps, pushing through the path kept clear through the cotton field to my sister's house. Running to the aid of her youngest child. The one she was helpless to save from grief. But in my mind's eye, I could see Mother standing near, silently, wringing her hands. Just in case.

I was upset too, for my sister, who poured her very self into that property, bought for a song at auction. She studied magazines, talked to carpenters, suppliers. She worked for the federal government to help pay for it. Without architects or decorators, she redid that compound pretty much from a down-at-the-heels rental house to a homesite that rates a Southern Living spread. To me, the farm's metamorphosis reflected my sister's own development, from a somewhat awkward, painfully shy little girl to the very graceful, beautiful woman she became.

I shouldn't have been surprised that my brother-in-law was burning brush on New Year's Eve, he's a worker bee, hyper, runs marathons to relax -- attributes that fuel his considerable business success. But I fretted about it to my friend anyway. "Why?" I asked her, emphasizing the scariness of this particular New Year's Eve. There was no one else for me to rail to about the situation. But L. was not impressed with my concern for a barn. A political junkie, one-time news media veteran like me, L. is a city girl, from a place she could easily take or leave. The place and the people are not burned deep inside her like a brand.

I answered the phone on the first new blast. "It's out of control now, the fire department is there but it's too late. They're just trying to make sure it doesn't get to the house now," said my mother, or something like that.

And these words I remember specifically, I can hear them echo clearly through the years: "Your sister told him off worse than I've ever heard her tell off anybody. Then she went inside. She went to bed with a headache." She hung up again, to rush back. For a second I wondered why she did not use the phone at my sister's house, but I knew. She didn't want my sister to know she was phoning in updates to me. And the rushing around gave my mother something to do with her manic energy.

My husband finally called. The minutes were ticking by, closer to midnight. But I was monitoring a real crisis, not a made up one. I explained quickly, trying to brush him off. "I NEED TO KEEP THE LINE OPEN HE HAS BURNED DOWN THE BARN THE WIND WAS TOO HIGH FOR BRUSH BURNING SHE'S TOLD HIM OFF AND NOW IS DOWN WITH A BAD HEADACHE." And my husband was saying "What, who, what ARE you talking about?"

Finally, the line was free. And it was ringing. My mother, of course, and again this was the gist of what she said: "You won't believe it, cars are lining the road, all up and down. People are getting out of their cars watching."

What?

But of course they came. This is the deep south, a very small town, still. And this was big news. "They're reminiscing, about the barn," my mother said. And my sister? "She came out for a little while. But then she went back to bed. She is so upset. This is the most upset I've ever seen her, I don't know if she'll ever get over it."

I was worried the onlookers would be put out about the barn's destruction, that their sense of ownership would make them act a little nutty, seeing a part of their youths go up senselessly in embers and smoke. But my mother said the mood was festive almost, that the crowd was telling one story after another about the midnight basketball games, volunteer firefighters too. The firemen had fought hard to contain the damage and had saved the house, the three-car garage and apartment above it, the other buildings. No one was hurt, none of the animals. It could have been worse. A lot worse.

So, like good southerners, they held a wake in the little village that once had more farm animals than people. For the barn and their young selves and a place where everyone knew each other and the names of the family pets, the number of cows in the field, before the space race brought so many people to Huntsville to the south, spilling over, expanding the town and changing it forever. Cars streamed up and down the road, slowly, some stopping and watching, others getting out and coming closer -- men, women and children.

And they listened to men well into middle age talk about jump shots and dunks, yelling matches, growing younger with each sentence, Mother said. They stayed late into the night, growing quieter as the flames died down. Everyone was kind to my brother-in-law, too.

My sister recovered from her headache and regained her gracious ways. And she quickly forgave the man she has loved since they were teenagers. Insurance paid for a new barn.

And I had my own wake that night, sitting only minutes from the most powerful city in the world, clutching a phone with steadily whitening knuckles, rapt with attention waiting for any word from down south. With a friend who had no idea what I was going on about.

At that point, I had been living many states away from Alabama for 20 years. When I moved away, I thought I was saying goodbye forever. But I never really left that little town. And the night the barn burned, I could see the very notion disintegrating like the embers pulled into the sky by the wind from the flames, a stream of carlights in the distance.

I understood, finally, that my heart was the biggest part of me. And it had never really left at all.

Love Part Deux, And So Forth

2009-03-15T21:49:00.000-07:00

*(Special thanks for the contribution of a significant phrase used in this entry to one of the most elegant writers I know, my old friend B.T., author of blog "A Little Guitar")

----

My husband calls my two-stoplight hometown a cult. "You're one of the few who got away," he says. He's joking. Partly.

But the place has a pull. It keeps the natives home when they certainly could go elsewhere. And draws them back, where a surprising number fall in love with people they walked the school halls with ages ago. Weren't those days supposed to be traumatic? I hear that so much from people. Well, not in my old stomping grounds, apparently.

Old grade school sweethearts are taking another turn on the dance floor in increasing numbers. The best friend's boyfriend is finally getting a shot, the one yearned for, from afar. Or somebody's little sister, even, barely noticed back then.

So, this keeps happening so often that someone in particular has started keeping a list. Because Cupid is striking again with such frequency. I have it on good authority that it is called Hometown Love Part Deux.

Okay, I confess, I keep the list. My sister collects the raw data and I edit the details into nice little bullets. Let's see...

1. M. dated T. forever, but she did go out with the other T. for a short time before they graduated high school. But he broke up with her. They married other people, both divorced. Years later, they got together and now they're married, living in her mother's old house.

2. KA married her high school sweetheart. They divorced after many years, when the kids were grown. KE married, well, at least two times. Divorced. Not sure when these two got together, whether they had looked at each other with yearning in their eyes. But now they are and are thrillingly happily. Are seen everywhere, holding hands like kids, glowing.

3. R.'s older sister D.A. was with star athlete R. forever. The know the type, the golden couple. They broke up, moved away, both married others. Then years later they are both back in town, older and wiser. Now they're back together.

And so it goes.

I keep the list because the new or renewed loves are happening so often that people were asking for the stories. And it's easier to prove my point this way. Skeptics who moved far away early and couldn't imagine themselves ever returning or coupling with someone from our origins are asking to see. I imagine them marveling and conjecturing. What if?

The place is no great shakes looks-wise, a bedroom community in the deep south halfway in between two for-real towns, one in Alabama, the other in Tennessee. It isn't even incorporated, literally a place you barely notice when you drive through.

My husband, meanwhile, comes from a little village in the Midwest that looks like a Norman Rockwell painting. Farmers sit on benches around a fountain in the pretty town square. In the summer, an orchestra plays at concerts on Wednesday nights and practically the whole town shows up. Popcorn and lemonade are sold. It is a lovely scene.

But population drain is killing that place.

So what is it about my little hometown, which I still call home despite living in the D.C. area for nearly 30 years.

There are jobs to be had, certainly. And rediscovering an old love is nothing new all over the world. Class reunions and the internet have made that possible. People say we look at our oldest childhood friends and don't see them for who they are. We see them for who they were. And on my fairly frequent trips home, that certainly is the case for me, with my friends. I don't notice when it happens, but a laugh, a nickname, a certain person's dimple suddenly will erase wrinkles, gray, decades of worry and even soul crushing grief.

But my little village was unique in other ways, I think, a mix of old and new, a chance destiny that resulted in a powerful hypnotic alchemy. It draws us home still, single and otherwise. All of us.

We shared the blissful oblivion of the young. Our parents raised us in the middle of woods and cotton fields, products of the rich red clay of the Tennessee River Valley. Scored by ponds, creeks and streams, nature then had the audacity to surround this lush vista with the storied, sometimes impenetrable Appalachian foothills.

And then this amazing thing happened.

After World War II, German scientist Werner Von Braun and his rocket team were brought to the United States as part of a secret operation. The men were quietly installed in Huntsville, AL, where they developed the rocket that propelled man to the moon on board the Apollo spacecraft.

People from all over streamed into Huntsville and surrounding farm villages to live, including my hometown to the north. School children in that era spent years being drilled to huddle under their desks in case of nuclear attack. But we had another, more heartening experience in our own back yards to distract us from that gruesome possibility.

We weren't just watching images of liftoffs on televisions. Our fathers, uncles, mothers, aunts and neighbors were working in the space effort. The big one we focused on consisted of sonic booms we felt from NASA tests to the south of us.

We were in history's flight path.

Which is the basis of my own hair-brain theory about why the past draws us back to our hometown so insistently, and binds us together, to others who can hear the same wordless song.

We didn't need to be astronauts, soaring over Earth itself, to feel the euphoria and hope of that generation's space exploration. We were living in the land of plenty, God's country indeed. A rural existence infused with the constant reminder of infinite possibility, of life soaring up and away with literally no limits.

Remembering, reliving it even, is easy because there were so many witnesses. And when we are together, and the timing is just right, suddenly we are back there again. Growing up, you see, in the shadow of the rocket.*

Back to the Mundane, Sort Of

2009-03-11T12:16:00.001-07:00

I spent the weekend in sports mom mode. My M.O. is not the norm for this area, where helicopter parenting is considered slacking off. My method is somewhat extreme, but in reverse. It works for us.

My son, D., got accustomed to my hands-off style because his dad's work trips kept him away from home so often. He came to prefer it, in fact. Dad is a teddy bear, affectionate, prone to spontaneous hugging and cutting up, shouts of "what about Jiggly Puff?" -- references to Pokemon figures he thinks are hilarious, but are criminal acts to a secure, outrageously loved and cared for now-teenage boy.

In addition, our son is painfully aware of his dad's presence on the sidelines. He makes a play, glances at his dad. Grabs a ball, glance, does something else, another look, fidget. In my way of thinking, even though they are supremely comfortable together -- they are clones -- the same thing makes them too wiggly in a sports setting (I'm a scientist, can't you tell?). This is an irony considering D.'s father is the very antithesis of the nasty sports fathers who spoil the fun for everyone, on the field and off.

When I asked why he preferred my company to his dad's on these trips, D. hemmed and hawed and came up with this: At the baseball field once dad scratched his back on the home plate fence. The fence was there, handy, and my husband availed himself of it with a quick back swipe or three. A friend pointed it out to me and we laughed. No harm no foul.

But oh the humiliation!

So often, I take the boy to his games, matches, whatever. My husband still travels, but even when home usually stays back. He works from home, maybe playing golf, getting things done, calling frequently and telling me to pretend it's not him on the phone. He doesn't like this, at all. But he adjusted. Especially after a travel soccer mom with a son playing goalie gently suggested to me that we "leave dad at home, D. does better with just you here." D. was a defender her son relied on, she was just looking after HER baby.

So. My method? The appearance of deep apathy. I'm also smaller, and it's easier for me to disappear.

I grew up in a sports crazed Alabama, ruled by the Alabama and Auburn college football teams. I've been at weddings where family members sat in the car listening to the radio during the actual service because the Crimson Tide game was still on. I mean, these people MISSED the weddings of their relatives!

I was not immune to this religious fervor. But that was back in the day.

I remember lying on the floorboard of our car in the driveway, curled in a fetal position, pilfered key in the switch, listening to the Alabama games. I couldn't take watching or listening inside with my brother and father. They were intense, grouchy, explosive about distractions. Athletes both, they critiqued the plays with the authority of men who had played the game well. Besides, I had work to do.

I prayed. I needed God to give the Bear just one more win. Every single Saturday. For instance: "Jesus, we really need that national championship. We need it really bad. I'll be good, I won't pretend to be sick on Sunday mornings anymore. I'll sit still in church. I won't mark my sister's arms with a pen. Well, I'll try on that one. If you and God can just help the Tide out just a little bit. Maybe you could send the Holy Ghost. I just hope he's not too busy."

Those were some of the most intense times of my life, praying the Crimson Tide to victory. Because we did need those wins. Even as a child, I knew Alabamians were pariahs for the searing images portraying our racial shame: George Wallace's stand in the schoolhouse door; horse-led charges onto a bridge of peaceful praying demonstrators; beatings and firehoses; Ku Klux Klansmen, flaming crosses, lynchings. And I can barely write this although I should every single day lest we forget -- the bomb that exploded in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing choir girls Addie Mae Collins, 14, Denise McNair, 11, Carole Robertson, 14, and Cynthia Wesley, 14, and injuring 22 others.

So, amid the horror we grasped for relief. And there it was, on the pages of the newspapers -- the Crimson Tide, the national championships, a nudge from the Bear that led to the eventual desegregation of the South's football teams, these were good things, happy things. So in my mind, sports was crucial, vitally important, and not just for the usual reasons.

So, last weekend I sat in the bleachers at my son's basketball games, huddled under a lime green pashima, hoping it hid the novel I was reading. I got lots of time for that. I also sat at the very top of the bleachers once and meditated a bit, eyes closed, hoping no one could see me. My son did, but he's used to his mother the non-fan. He prefers it, even. He's sorry for the players who chafe under the scrutiny of yelling parents, who dread the tense rides home.

He had great games, I was told by other parents who kept me updated on his scores, and then I did peek a bit (don't tell D.). So here is my analysis.

The Irish, solidly whipped all season, pulled off a win for the very last game. After being asleep at the switch for so long, the boys had plenty of energy banked, even though they barely managed enough players to field a team for the playoffs. The Irish had caught fire. The team incredibly won the first playoff game, which I had not predicted, saying "don't worry, we have plenty of free time this weekend since your team will lose the first playoff game."

The win was unexpected. The Irish were supposed to be pushovers. Tempers flared. A technical was called on a boy who threatened mayhem on the court. The foul-er argued, mightily. The ref was yelled out and he yelled back. The kid stalked out of the gym in a huff, followed by his mother. Fueled by righteousness, the Irish then won their afternoon game. But they couldn't keep it up. With only one sub (the other team had plenty), the Irish barely lost the championship the next day in overtime. But yeah, they still got trophies.

Then, this week, my son had the first scrimmage of his high school varsity tennis career. He's a freshman, ranked fourth on his team, whatever that means. I managed to make it to the courts after he had played his singles match. He lost, 7-10, but the coach was happy -- D. had turned in the best performance of any other player on the team, even the returning varsity veterans.

I'm a happy sports mom. It's easy to be at games these days. Not that I watch.

Bish

2009-03-03T07:02:00.000-08:00

A man with the evocative name Bishop Bone apparently lived sight unseen in my home when I was growing up. The name was rarely spoken. Although occasionally one parent or another quietly mentioned "Bish."

It took decades for me to comprehend the significance of this man.

Bish's first real "appearance" for me came when I was a bored teenager. My mother took me on an endless car ride into the Tennessee wilds, a place more remote than the Alabama countryside where I grew up. Mother was an eerily quiet person back then, before my garrulous father died. She said we were going to see "a friend." This was all I got in response to steady wheedling.

We arrived at a cottage almost entirely blanketed in wooded green. I channeled my faux well-raised Southern girl self and recited polit-ceties (*short for polite niceties, an example of the Ridge Talk specialty of my mother's family).

I was burning to get back to my grandmother's, who had a neighbor I had just discovered, the blond, beautiful Teddy, who was 14ish like me. Teddy was my new hobby while visiting the folks in Tennessee. I only wanted a glimpse of him, but was willing to spend hours in that pursuit, while pretending to not know he was alive.

But I had to survive the visit to a woman I had never heard of in my entire life. But was suddenly so important that my mother drove us a long distance on dirt roads through the wilds.

I do remember the uncharacteristically intense hug my mother gave this tiny, ancient woman in the cottage front room, which swelled with emotion that affected even the unpracticed heart of a put-upon 14-year-old.

They sat close in the sunlit room, speaking in low voices. Someone produced tea and sweets. The visit was soon over and we stood to leave. The woman of the house then picked up a framed picture of a young man in uniform from among the antique pieces in the room and handed it to my mother. And my mother burst into tears.

I had never seen that happen. Ever.

But my mother hugged the woman goodbye, hustled us out of the room and we were off. She would not talk about it, sticking to her version of the story: The woman was an old friend, the man in the picture was her son. They were people she knew growing up. End of story. Period.

Years later my father died at 80. Bits and pieces of their lives before us had come out. I knew, at this point, that my father had been a gunner-engineer on an Army Air Corps bomber in Europe during World War II and survived many missions. In fact his plane, or what was left of it, was in the Smithsonian for a while. I was able to take my son to see it. And my mother and brother came up for a ceremony dedicating a plaque with the names of the men who flew that aircraft.

My father knew my mother's brothers growing up. But she was 10 years younger and they did not meet until the day he sat beside her on a bus, after the war. They struck up a conversation. And the rest was history, as they say.

Their marriage seemed to be a practical one. They cared for one another, certainly, but there was no evidence of great love or passion. My father ruled the roost and my mother complied. The usual for that time and place.

But after my father died, the presence of Bish grew.

My mother started to talk. "Is she seeming hyper?" my brother asked one day. We'd never known her to be so verbal. And finally the story of Bish came up. A little bit here and there, but finally this man was fleshed out enough for me to see him.

My mother grew up with Bishop Bone. She was a tomboy, the youngest of a large family, a girl with many brothers who lost her father at age 12. As the two got older, love blossomed. But there was a war on and Bish and her brothers were going.

They would marry when he returned. Although they both had been born and raised in that tiny place, he wanted to see what waited for them outside the limited circumstances of a farming community in Middle Tennessee. He thought they would maybe move to Chicago. Then see the world. Oh yes, she said, she would love that.

He left. Mother waited. And then the news came. Bish had died. He had drowned in the English Channel. He was with other American soldiers who had survived the ditching of the plane into the dark cold water. But they were waiting for enemy troops to move away before climbing to safety on the shore. Belgian troops or townspeople, I don't remember the details, were creating a distraction to help the Americans. No one could explain what happened. Why Bish slipped away.

Details were still murky, more than 60 years after that shattering death. And Mother could barely lodge the words up from her throat.

I will never understand it, she said. He was the best swimmer. He could swim in any kind of water.

My father also knew Bish. And he had fought and survived that war, which also claimed the life of one of my mother's brothers. And then my father came home and sat down beside a pretty young woman on a bus. A woman who underneath her quiet way was consumed by too many losses.

My mother is as loyal as they come. When my father died, she arranged his wake, funeral and after-services lunch at our home. Then we drove the nearly four hours to their hometown in Tennessee for another round of funeral festivities. And she buried him there, as he wished.

And then she waited the recommended time, built another house, and started dispersing Daddy's belongings. She handed over his watch and class ring, his rifle and shotgun, his dress white straw hat, his medals from the war.

The flight wings were tarnished so I cleaned them and another pair I had found with the set. I thought maybe my father had two for some reason. Some people order another set after misplacing them and then the original shows up.

But when my mother saw me rubbing away, she picked up one of the wings, startled. She said, "This is your father's, you can have it. But this one is mine."

And I knew who had worn those wings, a young man long buried in Belgium. And I knew what was next. This woman in her '80s clasped the silver piece tight in her hand, then to her chest, and rushed from the room, refusing to talk about it, as always. The 60-year-old grief as powerful, present and stifling as its initial blow.

The Fire Revisited

2009-02-18T20:24:00.000-08:00

G. brought up the haunted house. The old Gable House, which burned to the ground ages ago. But the place still stands vivid in my mind, horrible and thrilling, like a close shrill scream in the night. But I was surprised at the conversational turn.

G. was visiting from my hometown. We had been talking about our plans for dinner, a foursome with my husband and G.'s beautiful wife. I had been thinking about home since getting his voicemail, hearing him call me by my high school nickname. No one here calls me that. So, hearing it sent me tumbling back in time.

And then he brought up the old house. Talking to G. is an exercise in free association. I've known him for four decades, at least. He's a lawyer and a Civil War buff. We have lots to talk about. And I never know which century we'll be visiting.

That day he implied he knew who burned down the old house built in the 1800s in the heart of a 500-acre plantation. G. is brilliant, connected. But he was wrong on this one.

I spent lots of time at that house. It was huge, gothic, nightmare-inspiring. It sat on an ancient Indian burial mound with a history that revolved around an owner who was a Maryland aristocrat, daughter of a Revolutionary War soldier. A woman said to have married -- and murdered -- seven husbands.

In more civilized times, the modern woman of the house babysat my sister and me. That meant she turned us over to her twins, who were a couple of years older. They took their mission seriously: To terrify their young charges.

I was in heaven.

They took us into rooms, slammed doors, turned off lights and showed us "blood" glowing in the dark. They gave us solemn tours of the hallway with seven lonely nails hammered into the wall for the hats of the doomed spouses. They took us outside and showed us spaces underneath the house and stones they claimed were the headstones for the victims.

My younger sister cried. I begged for more. I loved that old house, and not just for the horrors. But for the endless, unused rooms, high ceilings and more staircases than I could find uses for. This is what I see now in my mind's eye: Long white gauze curtains billowing in the soft breeze on the landing, halfway up the front staircase, just at the curve. The spot where a ghost could pause and watch a visitor coming into the foyer from the heavy door. After the ride down the long straight drive from the road to the gabled house on a high hill.

Before someone burned that house to the ground.

My babysitter twins were renters. I don't know who lived there after they moved. It had been abandoned for a long time when it burned all those years ago.

The story was a familiar one. The house was not cared for and quickly became an eyesore and a magnet for teenagers and miscreants, who drove onto the neglected grounds to party and steal anything not nailed down.

The person rumored to have set fire to the house was a teenage boy. He was the older brother of my friend P. I spent quite a few weekends with her as a kid. Their mother was often sick, spending most of her time tucked away in her first floor room in their home, another large white "haunted" house filled with antiques on a hill.

We were on the second floor. He stayed in his room playing loud music, growling at us when we did get a glimpse of him. He would boobytrap her bedroom door with firecrackers while we were inside playing Elvis records. He hated us and we didn't know why. There were rock-throwing incidents involving trucks, dark things.

But, he grew up. He became a successful businessman in another town. He married, appeared to have it all, to do well in life. He appeared to be fine.

But he wasn't fine.

Years after the Gable House burned, he set off one more round of fire. His marriage in ruins, alcohol a factor, he walked onto the deck at the back of his beautiful home and put a gun to his head. He pulled the trigger. He died.

Finally, burning down the Gable House made a strange sort of sense to me. That rage-filled boy couldn't burn down his own "haunted" house on a hill with his parents and sister inside. So he burned down the empty one. The Gable House. But it wasn't enough.

So he set another fire, this time to himself.

He caused terrible hurt along the way, to himself and to others, something I know about first hand. He was my brother's best friend.

Confession

2009-02-07T08:44:00.000-08:00

I have been in deep denial about an old adversary that has me pinned to the ground in a death grip. Same time, same place. The winter blues.

It infuriates me. Every year I flood my brain with resolutions for outwitting this foe -- keeping busy, exercising more, nutrients, routines, guilting myself, meditation, prayer, PREMPTIVE STRIKE IT'S WAR MIZ SCARLETTE!

It does not help that I am married to The Iowa Snow Man. A tall lanky germanic specimen who I sometimes suspect was engineered in a test tube. This is a person who ostentatiously persists in wearing his khaki shorts in January, and of course, Top Siders and no socks. Who unhelpfully bellows good cheer about brisk, bracing days when the temperature is in single digits, the wind is howling and all I want to do is stay under my comforter sobbing.

My husband's older brother, who looks like he could star in a gladiator movie at age 60, was right: My husband diluted the bloodline with me. He was joking. That hardcore German-slash-Midwestern clan NEEDED some southern intervention (rescue really). But Mid-Atlantic winters should not be enough to send the mewling into a flying leap off the psychotic cliff. Yet, here I am, right at the edge, clinging to a frail sun-deprived tree branch, what is left of my frozen little mind. Pardon the melodrama.

And by the way, note to self: Grow up already.

Go to the Sage: Part 2

2009-02-01T21:43:00.000-08:00

Y. was a substantial woman, physically stocky, like a refrigerator she would say. And I could still see the girl who whipped the boys who dared to challenge her, sending them home to Mama, bleeding and whimpering. This was a girl fueled by the fury of too many early betrayals.

On reunion day, I asked her over to the house. But she pointed to her charges sitting happily inside the huge van. She had brought them so they could see where she had grown up. "They just love to go on road trips," she said, smiling. This was the gentle Y., who had grown up caring for those no one else would or could care for.

So we stood there on the side of the road where cotton fields had been cleared to make way for our houses in the late 1950s. Near the woods where a bobcat had come down from the Appalachian foothills to scream like a woman on some nights. Just like the old days of meeting in the middle, leaning against a vehicle. Old habits.

Y.'s long hair was swirled on top of her head in a bun. She wore dark, matronly clothes, a skirt grazing her ankles. The style was unmistakable -- this oldest daughter of religious outlaws was now wearing the informal uniform of the Pentecostal faith.

She was so nervous I reached out and hugged her. It had been decades since we'd last seen each other. I had moved up "north" and thought I was living an exciting, important life (this would change, dramatically, in a few years time). So I blustered on about this and that until I grew tired of myself, and finally asked Y. to take a turn, to fill the air on that suddenly too quiet blacktop road.

So she talked, in a rush of words that always made it hard to follow her. About her life. About her mother's escapades, the two other children born after her long absences, the fathers a question mark. And about her mother's death, at 36, not of alcoholism or a violent act outside a tavern or a car crash. But from the sneak thief, cancer.

Y. had already left home when her mother died, escaped the stepdad who barely tolerated her. And with her mother's death she just fell apart. After a lifetime of sheer gumption, scraping for food for her siblings, surviving the scorched earth left by alcoholic parents who did not even put up a pretense. Going to school after all-night parental benders, giving up her childhood, fighting insults. It had been there all along, her mother's big black hole of self-destruction. So Y. picked up the bottle and jumped in.

"I was just running in the juke joints," she said in her high-pitched verbal rush. As with churches, back street dives were always abundant in decent-sized towns in the deep South. Guzzling beer like water, knocking back whiskey, knocking back the pain. And she wasn't beating up the boys anymore. The other way around, mostly.

It was all so predictable. And then it wasn't.

"A little piece of paper" all but blew into her hand. A religious tract. "It was just sitting there in the beer joint." She was drunk. But she picked it up, took it home and read it. And it struck her with a force she couldn't describe. "I was saved" from that day forward, she said.

The nerves again. I knew what she wanted. She was desperate to witness. I'd been raised in a conservative Protestant household, but even if I had been practicing that faith, it was no match for the fervor of a Pentecostal.

And I knew why: This woman who had been in the saving business her whole life wanted to rescue her earliest friend. Y. absolutely believed with every fiber and wanted to know I'd be walking with her through the pearly gates someday. I've been dealing with this in my own family forever. So I understand these urges.

But there was no way I was going to let Y. initiate me into Pentecostal-hood. I was and am just not down with speaking in tongues, and especially the footwashing thing.

But I believe I got my own point across as we talked into the afternoon, shifting from foot to foot on the edge of the road as Y.'s charges murmured and laughed inside the van, echoing us, just happy to be together.

And this is what I know. The nights we huddled in the sage while a lost wildcat screamed nearby, the afternoons we held grim vigil to sacrifice gallons of liquor to the plumbing gods were hot irons that seared us into each others' hearts. Time and hundreds of miles cannot remove these things. We are branded by and with each other. Forever.

Go To The Sage

2009-01-13T22:21:00.001-08:00

I did not think I would see her again. But there she was, Y., standing in front of her old house. A fine tremor stirred the hand she raised to pat her hair, an old habit among women. Nerves. And why not. She spent decades burying her old childhood. And then one day it surfaced, all grown up, driving a little car with out-of-state plates.

But she had initiated this reunion. I knew the second I laid eyes on Y. that she wanted to take it all back, climb into that big van and drive back to Georgia where she'd made a good life, taking care of disabled people in her home. Good care too, I imagined. The kind of care no one bothered to take for her.

Because she had been the caregiver in that home, the one we were standing in front of on that cold Alabama day. She was 8 when she moved in across the street, her electrician father to work in spinoff efforts for the space race too, like mine. Our families were friendly, at first. But too soon that changed.

Her parents were drinkers. Bad drinkers. Mine were old-fashioned religious teetotalers. This set up a war of titans. So Y. and I, and our sisters, were instant underground allies. It was match made in heaven and hell. Y. And I were the resistance. On both fronts.

Soon, Y. and I were enjoying our first cigarettes -- Kents filched from her mother. We coughed our heads off behind my house and fibbed to my mother about choking on Dr. Pepper. I was already a pint-sized rebel, rule breaker, born firebug kept from burning down the house one day by my perfect older brother and his buddy. Y. saved me from the solitary pursuit of these pasttimes and introduced me to others.

I kept her company, too,.

Like the awful nights of violence that broke out before her mother, a bride at 16, just took off, sometimes for months. They would build, these cataclysms, as predictable as the spring tornado season. You never knew exactly when the big nasty would hit. You just knew it would and it would be bad.

But we tried to intervene, Y. and I. Like somber Presbyterians, we stole through her house after school, pouring out the liquor. Down the sinks, loads of it. We had to act quickly, I wasn't supposed to step foot on the infidels' property.

But it never worked. There was always more alcohol. And late at night, dragged up from deep slumber, I could hear it -- the screaming, the crashes, the slamming doors and bodies. It had begun. Again.

And I knew what to do.

I would slip from bed with a quilt and feel my way into the kitchen. Quickly fill a pillowcase with any food and drinks I could find. If my parents were up, trying to decide whether this particular upheaval was worthy of a police call (which always came with months of retribution from Y.'s furious parents), I had to be careful. I needed them to think I was still asleep.

Unlocking the back door, I would quickly run to sanctuary next to my house, or across the street, by Y's place. And they would be there, shivering in the tall golden sagebrush even on the hottest of nights, the three of them, Y. and her two young sisters.

I don't remember being afraid on those nights. We were safe in the sage. We built huts there, erecting bamboo foundations and filling in with sage fronds. I needed water features even then, so I landscaped by digging little ponds that I stocked with minnows pinched from daddy's bait bucket.

On the Bad Nights, the little girls were always crying. And Y. was exhausted, lips quivering, eyes red and swollen, arms around the little two. Rage beatings sometimes had been administered, always on Y. Psychiatrists call this transferral, I think, mad at somebody but lash out at another, someone smaller, weaker. We didn't have any idea about that, then.

I got my share of the belt, too. This wasn't unusual in the early '60s in the deep South where it was respected as a righteous form of discipline, even if the belting was inflicted for no other reason than the inflictor was just pissed off at somebody. But we had the idea the belt was our fault. That we caused these senseless outbursts. We didn't want to believe it, though, we raged against it in our own way. It was just too much to bear.

So Y. and I took the unbearables to the woods behind our houses and to the sage, in the good times and bad. Y.'s were out there for the world to see. Mine were secret, carefully arranged under the heavy smothering cloak of southern civility. Forgotten, it was assumed I'm sure, disregarded, not to be mentioned or even thought about.

In real life, though, that just doesn't happen.

But that's another story. For next time...

How I Wasn't Surprised

2009-01-11T15:33:00.000-08:00

Visiting a stunning waterfront home one bright fall day, I bee-lined for my main attraction -- the big water out back. But my attention was diverted by some curious sculptures in a clearing on the property. These were life-sized statues of children in play. Despite the dark brown monotone, they seemed real, frozen in motion yet poised to burst into life.

My dart to the water was arrested. I stopped to stare. And I wasn't the only one.

This was a gorgeous home built on a large wooded lot on the bay, furnished with champagne tastes and budget. A wall of windows faced the water side, caterers pulled food trays from the ovens in the gourmet kitchen and guests walked carefully on chic tiles, brushing by smart furniture. Even the closets in the re-done master bedroom had their own telephones and televisions. A walk through the woods to the water was rewarded with a a terraced deck overlooking majestic bay waters.

The bells and whistles eventually won out, of course. But almost everyone was drawn to the sculptures. And the children with heartbeats couldn't keep their eyes or hands off the facsimilies.

The flesh and blood models patted the bronze counterparts, holding the cold, hard hands. One actual toddler boy tried to pull down the faux boy's pants to see whether it had, well, business parts. This boy, so beautiful he could be a Gap or baby Ralph Lauren model, took a napkin and worked with care to clean the sculptured arms of sand he'd kicked up earlier.

Party-goers assumed our charming hostess had picked out the sculptures. She had long collected art and filled her homes with paintings. But no, she told us, her husband bought the art children without prior consultation. These pieces were simply delivered, to her consternation. So they languished in the basement for months while she figured out what to do. Landscapers were hired. They made a pebble and sand lot for the hard ones to cavort on, within easy view of the house.

This did not surprise me. Because several years ago I sat with this man at the tail-end of a business dinner far from home, compensated by multiple bottles of good wine. And he made a confession now commonplace from successful men nearing retirement age. He had spent too much time and energy away from his family when his now-grown children were young. His first marriage had broken up as a result, he said. He absolutely loved his second wife, their life, her biological children who he considered his own. But he could never get back the time he'd lost with his first, nuclear family. He had not taken good care with them.

Which made exquisite sense of the circle of bronzed children this man bought out of the blue, without a word of explanation. And had placed behind this grownup wonderland of a home where he is now spending his retirement years.

These perfect, silent bronze children will be with him until the end, keeping company, forever poised in youth and joy, playing together through the long days and cold, dark nights.

He Doesn't Want to Grow Up

2009-01-08T21:46:00.000-08:00

Mr. Beaudreaux, my southern nickname for my D.C.-born son, dropped a bomb on me the other day.

"I don't ever want to grow up."

He said this with the careful nonchalance of a male new to his 15th year. I watched him, looking for all the wild feeling that kept him screaming for so much of his first year. My Daniel in the Lion's Den, who fell calm when strapped into a car seat, soaring through space in airplanes and cars. Lulled to stillness only by motion.

We were in the car, again, but he didn't return my gaze. "I just don't want to. I want to stay a kid."

I couldn't speak. Do we coddle, his dad and I? Is he so terrified of the world he doesn't want to go out and see it for himself? He's not really sheltered. He's always off playing sports, visiting somebody or another. We had to wait for him, our miracle child, and never left him behind. My husband's work trips paid for hotel rooms and tickets were bought with airline miles. I took this boy with me on a plane when he was 3 months old. He's been all over the United States, including the long trek to Hawaii. He and his dad sit around shouting out the states the boy has visited.

My siblings and I couldn't wait to move out of our parents' house. That pushed and motivated us to make something of ourselves. We never told our parents that. We weren't trying to make them proud, the truth is we were just trying to flee from them.

But now Mr. B. says he doesn't want to grow up. I've always pictured him charging out into the world chest thrown back, running away from us as fast as he could, from his dad's bossiness and my neurotic worries. But I don't know how to help him with the Peter Pan thing or even if I can. And that breaks my heart more than a little.

Seatbelt Yoga

2009-01-07T10:49:00.000-08:00

"I give you a 9.5. Not bad at all."

That was my score. Delivered by the service manager who sat and watched me wiggle, roll and slide out of my car -- pelvis first -- because I could not get out of my seatbelt.

The belt had been balky for days. Then finally, it wouldn't release -- with me in the thing. So I drove to the dealership. I pulled into the bay, which is beside the glassed-in office of the service managers, who sit in a line handling calls and customers dropping off their cars.

I couldn't see them through the tinted glass. I hoped they were really busy that day.

So I took a deep breath, opened the door, slid my feet to the pavement and began to slide out of my seat. As an old friend used to say, I was definitely "captured up." I tried to loosen the shoulder harness, which very nearly strangled me. I had no choice, I had to execute sort of a yoga camel pose to escape. I was hoping the service managers who I KNEW WERE WATCHING ME were yoga types and might keep their minds on the spiritual and maybe even close their eyes and meditate. As if.

I slithered, slid, wiggled, knees first then the hips came out and waist. Next I threw up my arms in a touchdown pose and managed to extract my trunk. I quickly adjusted my clothes, smoothed down my crazed hair. I grabbed my bag and rushed from my car as though it was about to blow up.

I tried to slip unnoticed into the service office, which made no sense. Because all eyes were upon me.

"I guess you saw that," I said to the service rep nearest to the door. He did a great job keeping a straight face.

He had seen it, of course, they all had. They were desperately trying not to laugh in my face. After all, life can be pretty boring down at the car shop. Busted transmissions, extended warranties, irate customers, people upset about having to spend precious time down there pouring out money AGAIN.

And then one day a gift: A crazy woman slithering out of her car right in front of them, unannounced, for no good reason that anyone could fathom, at least right away.

I astonished them that day. And I got a brand new seatbelt. Guess what: Free of charge. Color me double astonished.

That Did Not Just Happen

2009-01-06T08:31:00.000-08:00

I was in my car at the bank's drive-in teller line. I wrote my check and sent it hurtling through the tube to the inside. Then I zoned out. And then it happened.

A woman on foot charged up to the teller window and started knocking. No response. She knocked again, harder. A teller appeared and asked, "Can I help you?" over the intercom. "I need to borrow a pen," said Miz On Foot. The teller suggested she come inside to be helped. Miz On Foot babbled about not having an I.D. with her. Stunned by this nonsensical response, maybe, the teller opened the drawer and shot out the pen.

Miz On Foot began scribbling her check, hanging onto the drawer as a prop. The teller again suggested that she come into the bank. Miz On Foot was writing fast, repeating that she hadn't brought a pen, didn't have her I.D. but that the tellers all knew her "very well. All of them. They know me very well."

She was done with her check. Her stunning act of audacity, of jumping line outside a bank, at the drive-in teller line, was very nearly accomplished. I burst into a long hardy laugh. I was certain we were being "Punked" or "Candid Camera'ed." Hopefully someone would hand us $100 for not blowing our tops, or whatever all those reality shows do on television these days.

But oh no, Miz On Foot was simply pulling an age old game, a fast one. Or trying. My hooting laughter must have shaken the teller awake or into her authority. She told Miz On Foot to "take your place in line and someone will help you when it's your turn." On Foot looked surprised, feigned astonishment herself. And then walked slowly back to her car.

It was parked in the drive-in line, no. 3 behind me.

I laughed all the way home.